It will be subtle, thus perhaps a welcome break from the chaotic bombardment out of the White House over the past three weeks. Look heavenward on the night of Friday February 10, and you’ll be rewarded by an ethereal sight that may help put our relatively small human endeavors into perspective: a full snow moon, dusted with a shadowy penumbral eclipse, sideswiped by a comet that’s worth breaking out binoculars for.
Tonight, discerning sky watchers just might be followed by a moon shadow, as the song popularized by folk artist Cat Stevens in the 1970s goes.
More accurately, it’ll be Earth’s shadow falling across the snow moon. Sky and Telescope calls it a “very deep penumbral eclipse,” meaning that the sun will slip through the outer edge of Earth’s shadow, or umbra. While this is not the rarest of occurrences, this time it will be more noticeable because almost the entire visage of the moon will fall within that secondary shadow.
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“In this particular case, the moon is going to pass very deep into the penumbra,” explains Space.com. “In fact, at the moment of greatest eclipse (7:43 p.m. EST), the penumbra will stretch across 98.84 percent of the lunar disk. Put another way, the uppermost edge of the moon will be just a mere 75 miles (120 kilometers) away from the indiscernible edge of the Earth’s umbra.”
That uppermost edge is where the darkest action will be, says Space.com. It will mostly be visible from northeastern Turtle Island and up into northern Canada, through Inuit territory. The phenomenon will manifest as a grayish cast on the moon that deepens and darkens over the course of a few hours and then slowly fades.
“The Earth’s shadow is composed of two parts: the inner dark cone-shaped umbra and the faint penumbra surrounding the umbra, as shown on the image below,” says Earthsky.org. “So be forewarned. A penumbral eclipse is nowhere as dramatic as a total or even partial umbral lunar eclipse.”
During this time—at 7:32 p.m. EST, according to TimeandDate.com—the snow moon will become full, so that when it emerges from the shadow, it will be even more luminescent than before. All in all, a glowing, gleaming good time! The video below gives a sense of what it will look like.
As if that weren’t enough, a few hours later comet 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdusakova will pass by, its green hue visible to those who are moved to take those binoculars out of the closet and aim them skyward. That will be visible all weekend, according to Sky and Telescope.
The astro-pundits are calling this month’s full moon the Snow Moon, though the Anishinaabe know it as the sucker moon, for the sucker fish who give their lives for Ojibwe survival. Snow moon could also be apt, given that northeastern Turtle Island is finally blanketed in the stuff. That will only amplify those silvery rays once they emerge from Mother Earth’s shadow, in this pre-Valentine’s Day sky treat.
