HAZEL DELL — Dan Petersen has seen many lunar eclipses, but the one he watched from his home Sunday night was special for a couple of reasons.
It wasn’t since the early 1980s that he’d viewed a supermoon and a lunar eclipse on the same night, and this eclipse happened early in the evening rather than the middle of the night.
“This is also something that shows astronomy can be done in the city,” Petersen said as he stood in a street inside the Meadow Verde retirement village. “A lunar eclipse is one of the most accessible of astronomical phenomena.”
OMSI — the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry — dubbed Sunday night’s moon a “triple treat:” it was the closest a full moon would be to earth this year (a supermoon); the nearest full moon to the September equinox (a harvest moon); and a total lunar eclipse (a blood moon) all on the same night.
“The full moon will slide through the dark shadow of the earth, and for 72 minutes the only light hitting the moon will be the reddish glow from earth’s sunrises and sunsets, resulting in a total lunar eclipse,” OMSI said in an email earlier this month, whetting astronomy enthusiasts’ appetites.
On Sunday, the moon came the closest it would to Earth in this year’s orbit, which was 221,753 miles away, OMSI reported in its email. When the moon is that close, it appears about 14 percent larger and 30 percent brighter than the moon does when it is at its farthest from the Earth, roughly 252,800 miles away, the museum noted.
Petersen, a member of the Vancouver Sidewalk Astronomers, was ready to take it all in at about 7 p.m. He set up two telescopes and carried binoculars and a digital camera. While a solar eclipse isn’t safe to view with the naked eye, a lunar eclipse can be observed without any eye protection. It also is easy to see without a telescope or binoculars.
The moon started to rise at about 6:55 p.m., and the sun set about five minutes later. At first, the moon was barely visible at all.
“Oh, there it is. I see it now,” Petersen said. “Now, another 10 minutes or so, you won’t be able to miss it.”
After about 7:30 p.m., the moon was easier to see and appeared to have a dark, dusty rose color. “As eclipses go, this is one of the darker ones,” Petersen commented.
Lunar eclipses come in many shades, he said. He recalled one he saw as a child that was almost too dark to see. Another he remembered was blood-red in part because there was a large amount of ash in the atmosphere.
Another member of the sidewalk astronomers, Cindy Franke of Hazel Dell, stopped by to say hello to Petersen before leaving to view the eclipse with another member of the club who was laid up with a broken ankle. A few of Petersen’s neighbors also said hello and chatted with him about the moon.
The eclipse peaked at about 7:45 p.m. and ended at about 9:30 p.m. Before Sunday, the supermoon-eclipse combination last happened in 1982, and it won’t happen again until 2033, astronomers say.
Petersen said he has had a love of astronomy since he was 5 years old. He grew up in the San Diego area during the dawn of the space age and recalls being fascinated by the Sputnik satellite at the age of 6.
“I can remember standing down here and watching this star go across the sky,” he said of Sputnik. That year, he built his first telescope and showed it to his classmates. “It was terrible, but it worked,” he said.
He now participates in many sky-watching activities with the Vancouver Sidewalk Astronomers, a loosely knit group of about a dozen Clark County residents.
About once a year, the group also goes out to a low-income neighborhood and lets children look to the sky through their telescopes, Petersen said, adding that “you never know when you’re going to ignite a spark in somebody.”
