Last night was a magical one, and not just because I danced to some great music at the wedding of a sailing friend of mine. I also was able to stand outside and, glass of rather fine Armagnac in hand, watch the lunar eclipse in a crystal clear night sky. I have dabbled a bit in astronomy over the years, but this sort of thing might make me part with a few pounds and buy a proper telescope. Think of it: for a short while, the remains of the Apollo landing craft were bathed in orange.
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When the Moon went a nice shade of orangeMarch 4th, 2007 |
 8 comments to When the Moon went a nice shade of orange |
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Luckily, the skies cleared up for a few hours up here in Scotland and we had perfect viewing conditions. I drank a couple of classes of Ardbeg to keep me warm and watched through the Celestron 6″ reflector my wife bought me for Christmas.
Wow!
“Think of it: for a short while, the remains of the Apollo landing craft were bathed in orange.”
You reckon? Be tricky to explain if it’s not there. “Aliens took it?”
Terry,
They can scan Mars and moons of Saturn to a few centimetres resolution – how comes no-one has scanned the Moon?
Well it was pissing it down where I was boyo’s
And the total eclipse was rubbish too (the sun that is,few years back)
That was like a gloomy January afternoon!
Well, except they weren’t bathed in orange.
The orange light in some of those pictures is a product of the earth’s atmosphere and particulates in it. The light up there on the moon actually bathing the Apollo remains was still “white” sunlight.
Still pretty looking from here, of course.
Ron,
Because while you can scan in range to better than a few centimetres, you can only scan in azimuth and elevation to a few tens of metres. Everything gets blurred out unless you’re pretty close.
Figure it out. The moon subtends an angle of about half a degree seen here on Earth. It’s three and a half thousand kilometres across. What angle does the Apollo lander subtend?
Sigivald,
The orange colour is because the Earth was not quite close enough to the moon to completely cover the sun (as seen from the moon) so you got the light of sunrise/sunset in a ring around the Earth shining on the moon – what is known as an annular eclipse of the sun caused by the Earth. The light bathing the near side of the moon during the eclipse was indeed red/orange.
I bet it must have looked spectacular from there.
Pa, thanks for pointing that out.