Just days after the autumnal equinox, as if to celebrate the start of fall, the full moon wanders into the spot of sky exactly opposite the sun, ushering in the last total eclipse in the United States until the year 2000.
You would think that total eclipses of the moon would take place more frequently. Earth’s million-mile-long shadow stretches way beyond the quarter-million-mile-away moon.
At that distance, our tapering shadow is still twice the moon’s width, so it doesn’t take much luck for the moon to plunge into it, especially since the lunar orbit is inclined a mere 5 degrees from the sun- Earth plane, in which our shadow is cast. Even when it hits off-center (as it does this month) instead of cleanly, the moon manages a total eclipse.
Lunar eclipses are also visible to all who have the moon in their sky at the time--half of Earth’s population--unlike ...
