(The Hollywood Reporter) — Anyone who’s looked back at photographs from the great Griffith Observatory on a chilly night three years ago will remember the visible moon! It lit up so brightly that one can almost smell the metal. The Griffith Observatory was even using its own astronomy equipment that night to take readings that took months to process.
The upcoming eclipse is even bigger. The last time this eclipse lasted for more than three hours, it was partly visible as far north as Montana. This one is expected to be visible from California all the way to Ontario in Canada.
The full eclipse will actually begin on April 15 but it will be less than a fourth of an hour before it begins, which is when the partial solar eclipse begins. You can see it all at once from California to Canada.
Luckily, the eclipse will probably be an excellent opportunity to have an ice cream cone, grab a sandwich or catch up on a few TV shows. The actual lunar eclipse won’t start until about 11:34 p.m. PST and won’t finish until 1:46 a.m. PST. The idea is, you won’t see anything until around the time of the total eclipse when the moon will be beginning to pass into the earth’s shadow.
It’s so important to understand that there are known and unknown facts about the eclipse that even experts find it difficult to predict its outcome. The current predicted time is anywhere from 2:25 a.m. to 2:40 a.m. PDT.
This is the longest total lunar eclipse since 1949, and it’s also one of the first three to be visible from North America in two years.
Read the full story: The Last Full Lunar Eclipse in Nearly 600 Years