Rare lunar eclipse in Columbia Sunday won’t return until 2050. Here’s the best time to see it
Columbia residents out late Sunday night will likely be seeing red.
Or they should if they look up.
A total lunar eclipse or blood moon will be visible from late Sunday into early Monday. Current weather forecasts call for only a few clouds Sunday night.
In a total lunar eclipse, the entire moon falls into the darkest part of Earth’s shadow, giving it a reddish hue, hence the name blood moon.
The total eclipse will last for 85 minutes, beginning at 11:29 p.m. on Sunday and ending at 12:54 a.m. on Monday.
However, the partial phase of the eclipse, when the moon begins entering Earth’s shadow, starts at 10:28 p.m. Sunday.
This lunar eclipse will be particularly special, given that the totality will last for more than an hour at a relatively favorable time in the evening and at an ideal point in the moon’s orbit when it will appear larger than normal, Patrick Hartigan, astronomer at Rice University in Texas, said in a press release.
Hartigan said viewers in North America will have to wait until the evening of Oct. 30, 2050, for another eclipse that meets all the favorable viewing criteria of the Sunday eclipse.
“We’ll actually have another total lunar eclipse this November, but it will occur in the pre-dawn hours in the U.S.,” Hartigan said. “If you relax the perigee constraint and just look for total lunar eclipses of reasonable duration that will be visible from the U.S. at a convenient hour, the next is in 2025 and there will be five more before the 2050 eclipse.”
During the partial phase, the moon will look as if something has taken a bite out of it. During the total phase, the moon will have a dull or bright reddish-brown color, “because sunlight from all the sunrises and sunsets on Earth are simultaneously visible on the lunar surface,” Hartigan said. “It’s a beautiful sight to behold as the moon slowly enters the shadow and then glows a ghostly red color during totality.”
The proximity of the moon to the Earth will be an additional visual perk for the Sunday eclipse. The moon’s orbit is elliptical and its distance from Earth can vary as much as 31,000 miles. When the moon is near perigee, the point in its orbit when it is nearest Earth, it appears about 6% larger in diameter and 13% brighter than an average full moon, Hartigan said.
The South Carolina State Museum in Columbia will host a viewing event on Sunday for those who want a little more than just seeing the astronomical event from their back yards.
The event, which lasts from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m., will feature planetarium and observatory managers to explain details about the eclipse and more. Also, the Boeing Observatory and select exhibition galleries, including Apollo 16 and Beyond: South Carolina in Space, will be open for guests to explore.
Tickets for the museum event cost $8 for members and $10 for the general public. To purchase tickets, click here.
