The first eclipse of 2025 is a week ahead.
The Moon will become a veiled lamp in the ceiling of the night between March 13 and 14 (Thursday and Friday). It will travel for an hour and six minutes entirely inside the northern half of Earth’s total shadow.
The timing favors America, though (as described on the first of the pages about it in Astronomical Calendar 2025) “Coastal lands of western Europe will see the eclipse shortly before sunrise, as the full Moon, going down to the opposite western horizon, meets the Earth’s shadow.”
Mid eclipse is close to 7h Universal Time. The picture shows you the times of other moments. To convert to the time for clocks that were twisted forward to “daylight-displacing” time on March 9, subtract 4 hours in the Eastern time zone, 5 in the Central, 6 Mountain, 7 Pacific.
One of the most exciting of these “contacts” is the second, when the dark total shadow first touches the Moon. Soon after, you should begin to see whether, and how much, the Moon, though deprived of all direct light from the Sun, is reddened by light refracted through Earth’s atmosphere.
Total Eclipse Needed
War, a cultural feature of species Homo sapiens, is overdue for total abolition.
As described in a news story on March 3, “A Thousand Snipers in the Sky,” drones have become dominant in warfare. Ukrainian soldiers inside an armored vehicle knew by experience that it protected them from mortar shells, but a drone detected a weak spot. What happened inside –
I’m in two minds whether to quote it. It would immediately cause you, as it did me, to conclude that things like this should never, never, happen and that therefore war should cease to happen. But I don’t quote it, because I don’t want to cause you nausea and sleep loss.
Why did it happen to these two men? It happened because, three years earlier, a man in Moscow calculated that starting a war would serve his ambition to go down in history as an empire-builder.
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Guy, your diagram, along with every other diagram I’ve seen showing the geometry of this eclipse, shows the Moon going through the northern part of the Earth’s umbra and not reaching descending node until after the eclipse. My image of the eclipse, which was taken just before totality started, looks like the following, however:
http://www.starvergnuegen.com/astropix/2025/03_march/2025_03_14_eclipse_f.html
I very carefully annotated the exact location of the ecliptic based on my planetarium software, and it appears that the Moon is already slightly below the ecliptic as the total phase is beginning. From this picture, it appears to have already gone through descending node.
Occasionally in your Astronomical Calendars, you would sometimes show the path of the Moon through an interesting star field as plotted from the center of the Earth, then from a location such as Philadelphia, to illustrate the difference of perspective. Is that what is going on here? When you created your diagram of this eclipse, what location on Earth did you select for the observer?
That diagram was intended to show the difference made by parallax for different locations. It was very laborious to construct, so I shirked making it again. I imagine it’s a parallax effectyou are talking about, if the Moon appears from your location to descend across the ecliptic at a time other than the descending node given geocentrically.
Good point. Putin dreamed of taking over Ukraine as a first step to restoring the Soviet Union. He will have to settle for Donetsk and Crimea. This will provide Russia with a warm water port and access to it, but at least World War III was averted.
It looks like Zelensky will be signing a deal in Saudi Arabia next week for the U. S. to mine rare earth minerals in his country. With a financial interest there the U.S. will provide security guarantees to Ukraine. Putin also suffered setbacks when Finland and Sweden joined NATO. Also, he has seen setbacks in energy exports due to European bans on Russian energy and the Nord Stream pipeline explosions..
Guy, thank you for the excellently detailed information on the lunar eclipse! I am hoping for a nice view and the opportunity to get some pictures during the early morning hours of the 14th. At the moment, our long range forecast is for cloudy weather that night here in central Virginia. Good luck to everyone in your efforts to see it where you live!
and now another has joined his ranks…
I pray for the day when the meek shall inherit the earth.
No, it happened because the US supported the anti-Soviet Nazis after WWII, and then, in 2014, overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine, and then violated the UN-approved Minsk I and II agreements with the purpose of re-arming Ukraine, as openly admitted by Merkel and Hollande. Yes, it happened because the US, the number one terrorist state in the world, is the empire-builder–not because Putin stood up to NATO expansion.