Taken separately, Supermoons and full moon eclipses represent rather common events that humanity has been witnessed many times before during the past centuries.
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The supermoon will pass through the earth’s shadow from 9:07 p.m. EDT Sunday until 12:27 a.m. Monday.
On Lima’s coastline it’s not often that a clear night sky occurs. Not a bird, not a plane, it’s a supermoon! Despite the fact that this incarnation of the moon comes around just once consistently, it’s not as puzzling as you may think.
“Because the orbit of the moon is not a ideal circle, the moon is sometimes closer to the Earth than at other times during its orbit”, Noah Petro, deputy project scientist for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in a press release.
If these scarps are still active, scientists believe that shallow moonquakes may occur most frequently when the moon is at apogee.
The Moon is slowly receding away from Earth and forces build as the Moon’s tidal distortion diminishes with distance and its rotation period slows with time.
It’s an interesting find, showing us there’s still much to learn about how the moon and Earth interact with one another.
“The discovery of so many previously undetected tectonic features as our LROC high-resolution image coverage continues to grow is truly remarkable”, said Mark Robinson of Arizona State University, coauthor and LROC principal investigator.
Earth’s gravity has influenced the orientation of thousands of faults that form in the lunar surface as the moon shrinks, according to new results from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft. [Supermoon Lunar Eclipse: Complete Blood Moon Coverage]. “It’s not dramatic, but it does look larger”.
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In the evening, sky-watchers will see a larger-than-normal moon begin to dim and turn red, lasting for more than an hour before returning to its normal brightness and color in the sky. While people such as the Incans and Mesopotamians historically viewed lunar eclipses as random and frightening occurrences, they’re actually quite predictable. But now scientists can predict them with huge accuracy – and we’re able to say when they’re going to happen for the next thousand years. Petro said it’s just a matter of knowing where Earth, the sun and the moon are at a given point in time. It’s rare for a total lunar eclipse to occur simultaneously with a supermoon. To get four blood moons you need something absolutely extraordinary in astrological terms.
