How to Watch This Week’s Fiery Super Flower Blood Moon Lunar Eclipse
An upcoming lunar eclipse will be visible to the naked eye between May 15-16 and will last for 85 minutes.
When the moon drifts into Earth’s shadow, the moon may appear coppery red.
This is the first lunar eclipse since May 2021.
You won’t need any funky DIY glasses to catch a glimpse of the coppery red moon during this month’s lunar eclipse. You’ll just need a clear sky—or an internet connection, if the clouds don’t cooperate—on the night of May 15 and into the early morning hours of May 16.
The first lunar eclipse in about a year will send the moon through Earth’s shadow, fully blocking it from a direct hit from the sun for 85 minutes, the best part of a nearly three-hour, 27-minute ride through Earth’s umbra, the inner shadow.
Earth casts a cone-shaped shadow behind it, blocking anything in that shadow from a direct view of the sun. There’s an outer section of this shadow, known as the penumbra, but what we really care about is the umbra.
On May 15 at 10:28 p.m. ET, the moon will start to slip into the umbra, beginning with—from our vantage point on Earth—the lower left side of the moon, turning it dark at the start of the event. As the moon shifts fully into the umbra by 11:28 p.m. ET, thanks to the way Earth refracts the sun’s light through its atmosphere, we will instead see a full darkening of the moon, a “double sunset” of sorts that turns the moon a sort of copper color.
Sometimes the moon appears more rusty orange or red, all depending on the nature of the atmosphere at the time of the eclipse. Even the moon may appear differently, with the top portion likely the darkest red-brown coloring, and the bottom half leaning toward copper or red. The height of this totality will come at 12:11 a.m. ET on May 16.
By 1:55 a.m. ET, the moon will have fully left the umbra. While it was just under a full year since the last lunar eclipse (May 26, 2021), we won’t have crazy long to wait for the next one, scheduled for folks in North America on November 8.
This animation from NASA depicts the changing appearance of the moon as it travels into and out of Earth’s shadows during the May lunar eclipse.
This month’s lunar eclipse can be seen throughout most of North America—not to mention Europe, South America, and much of Africa—but what time zone you live in will dictate just how much you get to see.
With the beginning of the real show at 10:28 p.m. ET, folks on the west side of the country will miss the start, with the moon rising already in a partially eclipsed state for much of the six westernmost states. This could make for some interesting astrophotography just after sunset in the southeast horizon. For folks in the extreme northwest of the country, including a small slice of Oregon and a fair chunk of Washington, the moon will rise in total eclipse.
It is safe to view a lunar eclipse with the naked eye, but you can get a more detailed look by using a telescope or binoculars. If clouds crowd your vision, plenty of places offer up a chance to view the eclipse online. NASA’s Science Live will run a YouTube broadcast and the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles has its own event scheduled.
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