Total Lunar Eclipse This Weekend 133
SeaDour writes "This Saturday night, March 3rd, a total lunar eclipse will be visible from nearly all inhabited parts of the world. A great shadow will stretch across the surface of the moon, eventually casting it in an eerie red glow as sunlight filters through our atmosphere onto the lunar surface. Viewers in Europe and Africa will have the best vantage point, able to watch the entire eclipse in action, while observers in most of the western hemisphere can see it eclipsed as it rises just after sunset."
Re:Panic?! (Score:5, Insightful)
How will 3rd world inhabitants react to this lunar eclipse?
Presumably with complete calm and mild interest, just like their condescending 1st world neighbors.
It's not like lunar eclipses aren't particularly rare, about two happen a year. A full eclipse is less frequent but still happens often enough to have been already experienced by most adults.
Indeed folks in poorer areas are usually less impressed by celestial phenomena because they are well familiar with such. Lighting costs money and so isn't as wasted as it is in many 1st world places, leaving the skies that much darker and their contents that much more visible.
Want to see someone freak out over the contents of a night sky? Take a young person from any large first world city far out into the countryside on a clear evening, let their eyes dark adjust, and then show them the night sky. That prompts "some pretty interesting responses".
Re:Panic?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Please accept my apology on behalf of the vast majority of the rest of us in the "first world," lacking a better term. The parent's comment made me cringe so hard I almost imploded. I'm not sure if that cretin is from the US, but in case he/she is, as a sentient American, I doubly apologize.
I really wish assholes like the OP would quit talking about the rest of the world in such condescending terms. I'm sick of being made to look bad by association with fools like that. Believe it or not, OP, otherly-skinned or located people are not ignorant savages. Now if we could just get rid of the ignorant savages among us in the first world.
God, how embarrassing.
Re:Panic?! (Score:3, Insightful)
In my country, there's nobody who thinks that fucking a virgin can cure aids.
We don't believe that Saddam Hussein used to eat babies for lunch, either.
We don't believe that the world was created in six days. I someone can create the world in six days, someone could turn the moon red, and eat it in a minute, right? We don't expose our kids to that kind of "knowledge", either.
I don't think someone should be talking shit about culture in the third world, when talking from an US centric forum.
People in Europe enjoy a better degree of literacy and culture than most third wolrd countries, but the US has a long way to go, especially in the stuff that we are talking about, like believing myths above science and stuff.