You may have seen a super moon, a blue moon or a blood moon at some point in your life, but a Wednesday morning spectacle will feature all three together: a Super Blue Blood Moon.
NASA says the best viewing will be in Western North America, Alaska and Hawaii. Delaware, however, will be presented with a much smaller spectacle, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Chief Scientist Jim Garvin said.
“We will see the full moon and really not much if any of the partial lunar eclipse,” Garvin said. “Very low on the horizon, the sun will have risen right at the time of totality, and it really won’t be much visible here in the East.”
The best time to view the moon with a reddish tint in the New York to D.C. area is around 6:48 a.m. Wednesday, according to NASA.
The Super Blue Blood Moon is the result of the moon being extra close to the Earth. It will be about 14 percent bigger, Garvin said. That’s coming together with it being the second full moon in January – a blue moon – and happening at the same time as a lunar eclipse in Western United States.
“Put all those things together and you have this special trifecta, this special hat trick of events that reminds us really how unique the moon is and reminds us to keep studying it,” Garvin said.
The last time this trifecta happened anywhere on Earth was 35 years ago. The next one will be in 2037.
And although NASA has already learned a lot about the moon from its Apollo missions, Garvin calls it a “major scientific frontier with so much to teach us.”
“We can use the moon as a natural laboratory to explore things that are very important in the history of Earth and Mars and ocean worlds, but which really aren’t well preserved. In some sense the moon is kind of like a textbook for solar system exploration,” Garvin said.
You can learn about or watch the spectacle at NASA.gov/moon.
