How to catch Thursday’s partial lunar eclipse

The final full moon of the summer will take on a reddish hue Thursday night into Friday as the Earth’s shadow covers the moon during a partial lunar eclipse.

“When it’s getting deep into the Earth’s shadow, the moon takes on this wondrous, what I call copper penny color,” said Greg Redfern, a NASA/JPL solar system ambassador based in Virginia. “ It’s a fun thing to watch it get deeper and deeper and deeper.”

A lunar eclipse occurs when the Earth moves between the moon and the sun, casting a shadow on the moon’s surface. During the event, the sun’s rays are filtered through Earth’s atmosphere and projected onto the moon, giving it the reddish tint.

“All of the sunrises and sunsets of our planet are what make that coppery color,” Redfern said. If an astronaut were on the moon and looking back at the Earth during a lunar eclipse, he said, they would see a red ring around the Earth.

Thursday’s eclipse will be partial but notable: 96.3% of the moon’s surface will be covered and visible to billions of people across all of North and South America, as well as parts of Europe and Africa.

On the East Coast, the action begins around 9:23 p.m. with the penumbral phase, which Redfern likens to “a bite” taken out of the moon.

The maximum eclipse will occur at 12:12 a.m. on Friday, when the moon enters the Earth’s umbra, the deepest part of the Earth’s shadow where the sun is completely blocked, according to NASA.

The event will end when the Earth completely moves out of the sun’s path at 3:01 a.m.

The best place to watch the partial eclipse will be away from bright city lights, but Redfern said it would still be possible to see portions of the eclipse “even from downtown Baltimore.” If you are far enough from light pollution — or not standing directly under a streetlight— he said you should even be able to see the Milky Way stretching across the sky.

Weather affects visibility, however, and Thursday’s forecast predicts rain and clouds. (Here is a livestream link to the eclipse, just in case.)

For avid stargazers, Redfern recommends looking to the west at sunset to see the planet Venus. For the next month, it will be visible low in the sky as a bright orb.

This partial lunar eclipse comes only a few weeks after the total solar eclipse that was visible in Iceland, Greenland, Russia, northern Spain, and parts of Portugal, and a partial solar eclipse that was visible in parts of the United States.