super — Blog — Sejal Soni

Sunday, September 27th, 2015. This date not only marks my fantasy football win over a world-renowned chemistry professor, but also marks a rare appearance of a super blood moon (...spooky).

What's that you ask? It's a phenomenon in the Earth-Moon-Sun system where the moon is at perigee, the point in its orbit when it's closest to the Earth, while also being in the Earth's shadow because of a total lunar eclipse!

Basically, the moon will appear unusually large and remarkably reddish. In other words, it will hit your eye like a big pizza pie. Thats amore!

Unfortunately, Manhattan does not present optimal viewing conditions and my phone does not have the optimal photographic capacity, so the photos I got just show the visible sliver of moon getting slightly smaller. The red hue was hard to see and even harder to capture due to clouds and light pollution. Thankfully, there were some nice smelling flowers nearby to take photos of as well!.

Large, medium, small moon slivers and pretty white flowers.

All photos by S. Soni.

Update: Here are some better photos of the eclipse taken in non-light-polluted Mystic, CT by Manju Soni. Special thanks to Manju!

The Earth's shadow getting in the way of the sunlight trying to reflect off the moon (M. Soni)