US eclipse watchers howl at Super Blood Wolf Moon but bitter cold cancels other festivities

LOS ANGELES

Skywatchers howled at the moon at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles when the full lunar eclipse appeared shortly after 9 p.m. Pacific time on Jan. 20 and our celestial neighbor was bathed reddish-orange during a Super Blood Wolf Moon.

“Amazing. As you can see, it’s a party atmosphere and everyone is just enjoying the spectacle,” said Rosalind Von Wendt from Los Angeles.

More than 1,500 people gathered at the observatory near the city’s famous Hollywood sign to watch the eclipse.

However, not everyone got to watch the cosmic show, with lunar eclipse parties canceled elsewhere due to a flash freeze across the central and northeastern United States. Icy roadways rather than cloudy skies were blamed by astronomers for spoiling the festivities.

In Los Angeles, where the weather was markedly warmer and skies cleared just in time, skywatchers were treated to a full spectacle of the Earth casting its shadow over the moon’s face.

“Oh it was fantastic, it was great,” said Brad Mortensen, from Philadelphia, Pa. “This was a great location. The observatory is always fun to visit so tonight when we heard about this we decided to come up.”

The moon did not vanish entirely during the total eclipse but, at its height, the entire lunar surface was bathed in a reddish-orange glow that gives rise to the “blood moon” description.

The reddish color is due to rays of sunlight passing through Earth’s dusty, polluted atmosphere as the moon falls into our planet’s shadow. The shorter, more pliable blue wavelengths of light are scattered outside the Earth’s shadow and the longer, less bendable red wavelengths are refracted toward the moon.

Adding to the visual effect is the fact that the eclipse occurred at a time when the moon reached a point in its orbit putting it close to Earth, an alignment called a supermoon.

It has also earned the name “wolf moon” because it appears in January, when wolves would howl in hunger outside villages early in U.S. history, according to The Farmers Almanac.

The best viewing of the one-hour total eclipse was from North and South America, with as many as 2.8 billion people able to see it from the Western Hemisphere, Europe, West Africa and northernmost Russia.