Hummingbird News Desk
KOLKATA, 19 MAY: It’s almost time for another “Blood Moon” eclipse in India. In the evening of 26 May, a rare Super Blood Moon will be visible in the eastern sky right after a total lunar eclipse.
Director of M P Birla Planetarium and renowned astrophysicist Debiprasad Duari on Wednesday said Kolkata had seen its last total lunar eclipse, 10 years ago, on December 10, 2011.
“On the night of May 26, the sun, earth and moon alignment will be such that from earth it will be viewed as a full moon and also eclipsed for some time. Moon on its journey around the earth will be passing through earth’s shadow for a few moments and will be totally eclipsed,” Duari said.
The total lunar eclipse will be visible mostly from Eastern Asia, Pacific Ocean, most parts of North and South America and Australia.
For most of India, the moon will be below the eastern horizon during the total eclipse and so people of the country cannot observe a blood moon, but in some parts, mostly from eastern India, people will see only the very last part of a partial lunar eclipse, that is also very close to the eastern horizon when the moon is just rising.
On that evening, the “moon rise in Kolkata will be at 6:15 pm and the interested people will just possibly get a few minutes glimpse of the partial eclipse which will end at around 6:22 pm,” he said.
For the other metropolis like Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai the eclipse will not be seen as during the eclipse phase moon will be below the horizon at these places.
The “Super Blood Moon 2021” is a “supermoon.”
It will be about 7% bigger than an average full Moon, but that’s not something you’re going to notice. What you will probably notice is that it will be about 15% brighter—the brightest, in fact, of 2021. That’s because it’s the closest full Moon to Earth of 2021.
A total lunar eclipse occurs when a full Moon enters Earth’s shadow in space. Of course, Earth is always casting a shadow into outer space opposite the Sun. It extends to around 870,000 miles/1.4 million km.
The Moon’s orbital path around Earth is roughly 5% inclined to the path of the Sun through our sky, so it rarely causes an eclipse of the Sun. So too lunar eclipses.
What happens on 26 May, 2021 will be the first lunar eclipses in 2021. The other will occur on 16 May, 2022, but it will not be visible from the Indian subcontinent. But on November 8, 2022 a lunar eclipse will be seen from India.
Explaining the reason behind calling it a blood moon, Duari said as the totally eclipsed moon takes a dark blackish red colour (it) is called a blood moon.
“This happens because of the comparatively less deviation of the red part of the moon light through the earth’s atmosphere and falling on the moon’s surface,” he said.