Lunar eclipse tomorrow night

While the astronomy world—and the media—has been agog lately with talk and images of the full solar eclipse in Cairns (or more likely clouded out versions of it), there's another eclipse coming.

This one is a penumbral lunar eclipse, where the Moon passes into the partial shadow of the Earth, as shown in this diagram by Space.com (not to scale).

This next cross-section picture shows how a penumbral eclipse misses the area of maximum shadowing (timeanddate.com).





The eclipse is happening tomorrow night (Wednesday night/Thursday morning)—over all of Australia and much of Asia too:

Map via NASA

The sequence starts at 11:15AEDST Wednesday night (12:15UTS), with mid-eclipse at 01:33AEDST (14:33UTS), and all over by 03:51AEDST (16:51UTS).

At the maximum eclipse, there should be a slight greying of the northern half of the Moon—no going blood red like with a full "umbral" eclipse though MrEclipse.com:

Here's hoping we get a break from the clouds that have been dogging most attempts to do anything of the astronomical kind around the Canberra region over recent weeks...

Clear skies!