Wednesday night was a triple whammy of celestial events, with a super blue blood moon visible to keen astronomers who were in the right place to see it.
Here are some of the best pictures from the special evening.
#ICYMI: This morning was a lunar trio with the #SuperBlueBloodMoon! That’s when you have a supermoon, which also happens to be the 2nd full Moon of the month, passing through Earth’s shadow during a total lunar eclipse. Here’s a timelapse from @NASAJPL: https://t.co/Px9ggzit97 pic.twitter.com/34uHGccmiE
— NASA (@NASA) February 1, 2018
A lunar eclipse is when the sun, moon and Earth are aligned, and the moon passes into the Earth’s shadow.
When the lunar eclipse was in full swing and the moon was in the Earth’s shadow, the sunlight reaching past the Earth and illuminating the moon has passed through the Earth’s atmosphere.
The blue parts of this light were more likely to be scattered by the atmosphere, leaving more red and orange light to fall on the moon.
“You may well have noticed that early on in the evening while the moon was still low in the sky, it was very clearly yellow,” said Dr Gregory Brown, an astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich. “This yellow colour is caused by our atmosphere scattering blue light away from the moon.
“This is also the reason why the sky appears blue, as blue light is scattered away from the sun (making it yellower) and scattered towards the observer from elsewhere in the sky. In big cities with high pollution, this effect can be even worse.”
