Lunar Eclipse October 17 12:00 GMT

saskboy writes "Space Weather gives viewing instructions for tonight's partial lunar eclipse. 'According to folklore, October's full moon is called the "Hunter's Moon" or sometimes the "Blood Moon." It gets its name from hunters who tracked and killed their prey by autumn moonlight, stockpiling food for the winter ahead. The Hunter's Moon of 2005 is due on Oct. 17th.'"

and a blue moon

[zappepcs]

is the second of two full moons occuring in a single month... so they do happen

Re:Welcome to modern times.

[saskboy]

"Why are we getting all giddy over a stupid eclipse? They're a fairly regular occurance. "

People get excited about things that happen only once a year all the time. *ahem birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas*

Astronomers like any old excuse to get out and look up at things that don't happen every day. The fact that we can predict these things when most people don't know the difference between a protractor and a compass, is, well, impressive. Don't spoil the astronomer's good time by saying it doesn't matter. Lots of things depend on the moon, and having more people focussing on the same good thing at the same time is bound to have positive effects.

Re:Welcome to modern times.

[jkauzlar]

It's 2005. Why are we getting all giddy over a stupid eclipse?

We can put a man on the moon; we can have a woman in the senate; we can talk to our mothers living two thousand miles away in Chicago while we shop for groceries in Los Angeles; We can manipulate DNA on scales of billionths of an inch; network television regularly offers believable portrayals of catastrophic disasters and explosions, not to mention news programs can take us to the other side of the world each and every night; Fermat's Last Theorem has been solved after being posed 400 years ago; physicsts can describe the first few seconds of the big bang; we have a robot on Mars regularly sending us pictures of the Martian landscape; we are living in a more or less completely-global economy; we finally have decent electric-hybrid cars; they can fit sixty gigibytes in a space not much bigger than your hand (the iPod); we have jets that travel faster than sound.

But people still get excited when the moon gets dark for a few seconds.