A Spooky 'Blood Moon' Is About to Appear in The Sky. Here's How to See It.
When the moon gets spooky on Friday night, don't panic. It's not an omen, it's just an eclipse.
Earth will cast its shadow across the moon, turning its surface red as our planet, our moon, and our sun align. That's why total lunar eclipses are sometimes called the " blood moon."
This will be the first total lunar eclipse in nearly two-and-a-half years.
The red color comes from the light of all the sunrises and sunsets happening across Earth.
That's because, even though the Earth is casting its shadow on the moon, the sun is still passing through Earth's atmosphere along the edge of that shadow. Those are all the regions where day is transitioning into night, and vice versa.
The atmosphere bends the sunlight toward the moon. Blue light gets scattered in the atmosphere, which is why the sky is blue. Only the red portion of the light spectrum cuts through to reach the lunar surface.
"It's as if all the world's sunrises and sunsets are projected onto the moon," NASA wrote in a blog post.
In New Zealand it will be visible as the moon rises early Friday evening.
To the naked eye, according to NASA, "it looks like a bite is being taken out of the lunar disk."
Use binoculars or a telescope to see the eclipse more clearly and peer at the moon's briefly-red craters. For taking photos, NASA recommends putting your phone on a tripod and setting the camera to take long exposures of at least a few seconds.
It will reach its totality between 8pm and 8.30pm and will end by 11pm.
If you miss it, don't worry because this is the first of three. There will be another total lunar eclipse in September, and then another in March.