Blood Red SuperMoon Lunar Eclipse: September 27, 2015

The full Moon of September 27/28 is a Supermoon – the Moon will be closest to the Earth. or at its perigee, as it turns into a full Moon. A rising Super Full Moon can look larger and brighter to spectators on Earth.

Total eclipses of Super Full Moons are rare. According to NASA, they have only occurred 5 times in the 1900s – in 1910, 1928, 1946, 1964 and 1982. After the September 27/ 28, 2015 Total Lunar Eclipse, a Supermoon eclipse will not happen again for another 18 years, until October 8, 2033.

So many of your children took the opportunity to see this rare phenomenon. During a Total Lunar Eclipse, the Sun, Earth and Moon form a straight line. The Earth blocks any direct sunlight from reaching the Moon. The Sun is behind the Earth, so the Sun's light casts the Earth's shadow on the Moon. This shadow covers the entire Moon and causes a Total Lunar Eclipse.

Even though the Earth completely blocks sunlight from directly reaching the surface of the Moon, the Moon is still visible to the naked eye during a Total Lunar Eclipse. This is because the Earth's atmosphere refracts sunlight and indirectly lights up the Moon's surface. The Earth's atmosphere removes or blocks parts of the sunlight's spectrum leaving only the longer wavelengths. Because of this, a totally eclipsed Moon usually looks red.

In class I had the children analyze one inch radius circles representing the moon and use compasses to show the relative size of Earth which is more than 3.5 times larger. They increased the radius of the compass to 3.5 inches and then experimented by creating shadows with this larger arc representing the Earth’s shadow. They  recreated 7 stages of the Supermoon on a piece of black construction paper and labeled the different stages. See the attached pdf with actual pictures of the Supermoon and an example of what their’s should look like.

I WOULD LIKE THEM TO PURCHASE AN INEXPENSIVE COMPASS AT CVS OR THE LIKE AND PRACTICE BECOMING PROFICIENT AT ITS USE. This will allow us to explore many different properties of circles in math and science throughout the year. 

I also gave them a picture of all of the known bodies in our solar system that have a radius of more than 100 miles from largest to smallest. I would like them to think about what an eclipse would look like on Jupiter with its 67 moons or Uranus with its 27 moons.