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Photo: courtesy of flickr.com
If you woke up this morning feeling witchy, you have a good excuse. Last night’s super blood moon was one of the rarest occurrences in lunar history: a “super moon” coincided with a lunar eclipse.
Essentially, the moon was both full and in perigee, making it as close to the Earth as it ever comes in its orbit. And because it occurred days after the fall equinox, it was also the harvest moon. Astronomers attribute the blood red color to a phenomenon called “refraction,” or the scattering of light from the sun in our atmosphere. For a few hours last night, the moon was reflecting a world’s worth of sunsets. The last total eclipse that had all these qualities happened in 1982, and the next won’t happen until 2033.
People in the United States, Europe, Africa and western Asia gazed up in awe as the moon fell under the Earth’s shadow, and some of the photos that have been surfacing this morning are nothing short of breathtaking. The event was, literally, astronomical.
If you are the kind of person who gets excited by a hint of superstition, then last night’s super blood moon offered an extra level of fascination. The Mormon Church released a public statement warning its flock of faithful not to get carried away with visions of the apocalypse. In Texas, Christian evangelical minister John Hagee has both written a book and spoken on television about the “blood moon prophecy,” the idea that this lunar eclipse is a sign of the end of times.
Alternately, in pagan belief, the phases of the moon’s cycle are looked at simply as a way to measure the passing of time and seasons. To students of pagan lore, the blood moon signals a “compelling time to build” and “shed old, useless habits.” So if you stayed up through the witching hour last night to catch a glimpse of this natural wonder, you might have woken up feeling extra charged with a mysterious, creative energy this a.m.. But seriously, whether you believe in superstitions or not, the cosmos are definitely a thing to marvel at.
-by Rachel Veroff