Lunar Eclipse

Mark your calenders boys and girls, Commencing at 4:20 a.m. EDT August 28/07 there will be a total eclipse of the moon for most of the Americas. I will post little reminders here and there to keep you up to date. Two buzz words that get any amateur astronomer's pulse going are "Eclipse" and "Transit". Eclipse is defined as , "when one celestial object moves into the shadow of another", during a Solar eclipse the Earth moves into the shadow created by the Moon comming between the Earth and Sun. In a lunar eclipse the Moon moves into the shadow created by the Earth comming between the Sun and Moon. I have posted an image I took of the Oct 28/04 eclipse. The beautiful reds and sometimes brown colors on the Moon during an eclipse are the result of sunlight being refracted through the Earths narrow, troposphere, which tends to only allow the longer wavelengths, reds through to the lunar surface, the blues are absorbed and scattered by our troposphere. A transit is defined as an astronomical event that occurs when one celestial body appears to move across the face of another celestial body, as seen by an observer at some particular vantage point. Transits can be as simple and frequent as one of Jupiter's moons moving across Jupiter's surface to Venus transiting the Sun which happens very infrequently, in 234 years only 4 Venus transits of the sun occured! the last one in 2004 I missed due to clouds, doh! Oh and the Mercury transit last year in Nov I missed due to snow storm.