Turn Your Eyes to the Night Skies This Week to See a Near-Total Lunar Eclipse. It'll Temporarily Turn the Moon Red

Earlier this month, a small sliver of the world—Greenland, Iceland, Portugal and Spain—got to witness a total solar eclipse. Now, the solar system has another gorgeous celestial event in store, and one that is significantly more accessible. From the night of August 27 into the next morning, the night skies will be graced with a deep partial lunar eclipse, during which the orb will appear orange-red.

The phenomenon occurs when Earth moves between the sun and the moon, casting a shadow on our natural satellite. (A solar eclipse, meanwhile, happens when the moon gets between the sun and our planet, putting a shadow on our star.) The lunar eclipse will peak on the 28th at 12:13 a.m. Eastern time, during which 96.3 percent of the moon will be within Earth’s umbra, or the central, darkest part of the shadow, according to NASA. This part of the eclipse will be viewable in most of the Americas, western Europe and western Africa.

During the event, the darkened area should take on a reddish hue. An almost “blood” moon will appear because of the same physics that give us gorgeous sunsets. When the sun is low in the sky, only yellow-to-red wavelengths of sunlight make it through the Earth’s atmosphere and to your eyes, while bluer light gets scattered away.

When Earth blocks most starlight from reaching the moon, the few rays that do reach our natural satellite similarly get filtered through our planet’s atmosphere. The moon will enter the partial eclipse phase about two hours before the peak, during which progressively larger bites of the moon will be tinted red. And after the maximum, the moon will slowly move out of Earth’s shadow for another two hours.

This week’s celestial event will fall short of a total lunar eclipse, meaning it’s not a true blood moon. Still, the same effect will change the orb’s color, but the exact tone will be partly dictated by Earth’s atmosphere’s “sooty-ness,” which depends on fire smoke, air quality, cloud cover and other factors, Andrew Fraknoi, an astronomer at the University of San Francisco, tells KQED’s Ella Jackson. More than three billion people will be able to see at least some of the partial phase of the eclipse, according to Time and Date.

A true total lunar eclipse On March 3, people in western North America, Australia, eastern Asia and the Pacific got to see a true blood moon. Not only do lunar eclipses last longer than solar eclipses—on the scale of hours, rather than minutes—they also don’t require any special equipment to be observed, he adds. Even people aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and China’s Tiangong space station might be able to witness the celestial show, according to the ’ Marcia Dunn.