22% full/lit
4.6 days old
September 28, 2014
...The full moon lights (click here) up the night sky, obscuring all but the brightest celestial objects. Every few months though, the silvery orb slides into darkness nearly disappearing from view, revealing the dimmer stars and sometimes guiding stargazers to celestial surprises.
Just before dawn begins on Wednesday October 8, the moon enters the long tapering cone of Earth’s shadow, becoming completely eclipsed in it an hour before sunrise. This will be the second in a series of four total lunar eclipses that began nearly six months ago on April 15.
By 5:25 a.m., skywatchers in southwestern Virginia will notice that the moon’s eastern edge is no longer round, but has a dark dent in its curvature. As the minutes pass, that dent becomes larger, quickly turning into a growing bite spreading across the lunar surface. The bite, which is really the darkness of Earth’s shadow, consumes the entire disk by 6:24 when the moon enters totality.
With the glaring moon absent from the sky, stars appear, some lying directly next to the shrouded lunar disk....
