Intellectual Property Law

Lunar Eclipse Tonight

By Deven Desai

Some of you may have heard that tonight there will be total lunar eclipse. NASA has a nice page on tonight’s event. Of course east coast bias abounds and it begins with the details for EST experience (tip: partial eclipse starts at 8:43 pm EST and the full eclipse starts at 10:01 pm). But fear not, there are links to images of how it will work for other time zones and a nice chart of the key phases in the different time zones. Then again one can just subtract or add to the EST timeline to figure out what is going on in one’s area. Apparently Mr. Fred Espenak of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center is the key to this wealth of information.

Even better one can go to the Javascript Lunar Explorer page and “compute the local circumstances for every lunar eclipse visible from a city for any century from -1999 to 3000 (2000 BCE to 3000 CE). When was the last total lunar eclipse visible from London? When is the next partial lunar eclipse visible from New York? These questions and many others can be answered easily using this web tool. Pick a geographic location and search for all eclipses visible from that spot over several thousand years.” Chris O’Byrne and Fred built this nice tool together.

For those wishing to capture the moment, Fred has his own site on how to photograph the eclipse.

Image: Wikicommons
Author: Steev from Wollongong, Australia
License: Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 License

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Full post as published by Madisonian.net on February 20, 2008 (boomark / email).