Port Harcourt citizens have been left amazed after they saw the blood moon. Some were scared and others excited.
Fret not our dearest readers.
find below all you need to know about the BLOOD MOON
A total lunar eclipse is sometimes called a Blood Moon, because of the reddish tinge the Full Moon takes on when fully eclipsed. The term is also frequently used to describe four total lunar eclipses that occur in a row.
Blood Moon is not a scientific term, though in recent times it is being widely used to refer to a total lunar eclipse because a fully eclipsed Moon often takes on a reddish color—like in the image below
A total lunar eclipse happens when the Moon travels through the Earth's umbra and blocks all direct sunlight from illuminating the Moon's surface. However, some sunlight still reaches the lunar surface indirectly, via the Earth's atmosphere, bathing the Moon in a reddish, yellow, or orange glow.
As the Sun's rays pass through the atmosphere, some colors in the light spectrum—those towards the violet spectrum—are filtered out by a phenomenon called Rayleigh scattering. This is the same mechanism that causes colorful sunrises and sunsets. Red wavelengths are least affected by this effect, so the light reaching the Moon's surface has a reddish hue, causing the fully eclipsed Moon to take on a red color.
Depending on the composition of the atmosphere, different parts of the light spectrum are filtered out, so the Moon may also look yellow, orange, or brown during a total lunar eclipse.
The term Blood Moon is also sometimes used to refer to four total lunar eclipses that happen in the span of two years, a phenomenon astronomers call a lunar tetrad. The eclipses in a tetrad occur about six months apart with at least six uneclipsed Full Moons between them.
Usually, only about one in three lunar eclipses are total, and about four to five total eclipses can be seen from any single location on Earth in a decade. This means that lunar tetrads are rare occurrences, leading some to attach special, even religious, significance to these events.
Photo Credit: Davholla via Instagram
