Tonight is a chance to see a nearly total lunar eclipse. Weather watchers and meteorologists say North Texas is in the area where parts of the moon will appear nearly reddish-brown. “You won’t need glasses or anything special—just clear skies and cooperative weather,” meteorologist Matthew Cappucci said this week. “All of the eclipse will be visible in the eastern U.S.; in the West, the eclipse will be ongoing around moonrise.”
With a lunar eclipse, the Earth passes between the sun and the moon, blocking most of the sunlight that would illuminate the moon. The light that does make it through appears reddish-orange because of the angle it passes through. Unlike a solar eclipse, a lunar eclipse is visible to a greater swath of the globe because the entire nighttime side of the Earth is in the path.
A caveat: According to the National Weather Service, tonight is supposed to be partly cloudy, which may hamper the ability of anyone to see much. But should the sky be relatively clear between 10:57 and 11:28 tonight, about 96.2 percent of the moon will be in the Earth’s shadow at the peak of the eclipse, “which is enough to turn it red,” Cappucci says. The next good lunar eclipse will probably be New Year’s Eve 2028…