Professional and amateur astronomers got off to a special start to the week thanks to a striking and unusual phenomenon: a super blood moon.
Shortly after midnight on Sunday morning to this Monday (16, Brasília time), the Earth orbited exactly between the Sun and the Moon for a few minutes.
The Moon was eclipsed by the Earth and temporarily acquired a deep dark red color.
This is because sunlight is projected through the Earth’s atmosphere onto the shadowed surface of the Moon.
This week’s lunar eclipse coincided with another phenomenon: a supermoon, which occurs when the Moon is at its closest point to Earth in its orbit and therefore appears larger than normal.
The best time to observe the supermoon was at 12:39 am, when the full lunar eclipse began and became visible in the Western Hemisphere.
For nearly an hour and a half afterwards, the only sunlight that reached the Moon was passing through the Earth’s atmosphere, turning it red.
In Brazil and the United States, where there were clear skies, the spectacle was fully appreciated. In Europe, the phenomenon was only visible for a short time.
“If you were an astronaut on the Moon, looking at Earth, you would see a red ring expanding around our planet,” Gregory Brown, an astronomer at London’s Royal Observatory Greenwich, told the BBC.
See images of the phenomenon in different countries:
