Blood Moon: Here are the best spots to watch the last total eclipse before 2025

Get your glasses ready because you won't be able to see tomorrow's total lunar eclipse in three years.

The total lunar eclipse will be visible across Asia, Australia, and the rest of the Pacific after sunset and throughout North America in the early morning hours. As an added bonus, Uranus, which is like a bright star, will be visible barely a finger's width above the moon, as reported in Phys. It will last approximately one and a half hours from 5:16 a.m. to 6:41 a.m.

Called Blood Moon, the southern limb of it will pass directly across the center of the shadow cast by the Earth. The Moon's apparent diameter will be lower since it will be only 5.8 days before its apogee, which will be on November 14, 2022. The following total lunar eclipse won't occur until March 14, 2025. The US is seeing its first total Moon eclipse on election day.

Bad news for South America, the Middle East, and Europe. They have to wait until 2025.

What Is a total lunar eclipse?

It happens when the Moon completely enters the umbra of the Earth. The lunar limb, the curved part of the Moon still receiving direct sunlight, will seem bright just before the full entrance, making the remainder of the Moon appear relatively dull. The Moon will become more or less consistently bright across its entire surface as soon as the eclipse is complete. Later, when sunlight strikes the Moon's opposite limb, the entire disk will once more become veiled.

This is due to the fact that, when seen from Earth, a lunar limb's brightness is typically greater than that of the rest of the surface due to reflections from the limb's numerous surface irregularities.

Sunlight striking these irregularities is always reflected back in greater quantities than that striking more central parts, which is why the edges of full moons typically appear brighter than the rest of the lunar surface. This is comparable to the appearance of velvet cloth draped over a convex curved surface, which will look darkest near the curve's center to an observer. When observed from the other side of the Sun, it will be true of any planetary body with an uneven cratered surface and little or no atmosphere.

More about Blood Moon

A more straightforward interpretation has to do with the Blood Moon hue that an entirely obscured Moon assumes to viewers on Earth. The gaseous layer in the Earth's atmosphere filters and refracts sunlight so that the visible spectrum's green to violet wavelengths scatter more strongly than its red wavelengths, giving the Moon a reddish hue.