Eclipse lunar

[orangelemon]

My friend writes me that the people in Chiapas think that the sun wants to cover the moon. So they make noise with drums, horns, conch shells, and firecrackers to scare the sun and help the moon escape from him

Comments

[jtdiii]

Some of us sat outside watching the eclipse in total darkness with a perfectly clear sky, and only a few distant cars, a quickly startled deer, a few oblivious turkeys, a hooting owl and a burbling brook to to provide background noise. I did have a laptop on the lowest screen setting with me so I could do homework, but the screen was turned off most of the time.

The moon turns reddish orange due to the Earth's atmosphere. The red/orange spectrum are in the longer wavelengths and are scattered less than the blue spectrum. This is the same reason that sunrises and sunsets seem red and orange while the sky above is blue. This is also why the edge of the earth's shadow is more brightly orange than the center is, as while some of the light is scattered across the entire moon, the majority is bent less and the bright ring around the shadow is the light from the sun that has gone through the Earth's atmosphere.

You can think of the earth as a dark center with a lens around it. The center stops the light from the sun, but the lens scatters the light that hits the edge a bit like millions of prisms and red light is the part that bends the least and makes it through.

The people on the mountains get their conch shells the way the rest of us do: ebay... :)

[orangelemon]

Thanks for the explanation! I thought it had something to do with the waves of light and the color spectrum but wasn't quite sure exactly what. (resisting the urge to go off on a tangent about spectral and Halloween and so forth.)

Of course, ebay. Silly me...:)