What is a Lunar Eclipse?
The spectacle of the Moon passing through the Earth’s shadow is not as simple as you might expect, however. Rather than simply passing into the darkness to vanish for a while, before re-emerging into the light, we see quite a complex sequence of events. This is because the Earth’s shadow is composed of two regions: The penumbra and the umbra. The umbra is the fully dark part of the shadow, and is shown in the diagram above as the dark … Continue reading →