For those observers that were unfortunately clouded out, NASA’s online live streaming of the event broadcast from Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, with a live feed from the Griffith Observatory, Los Angeles, California, proved enormously popular.
Observers in the British Isles have to wait until the evening of Friday, 27 July 2018 for the next ‘normal’ total lunar eclipse visible from these shores, while the next totally eclipsed supermoon entails a slightly longer wait: 8 October 2033.
For the seventh and final time this year, the Moon occults outermost planet Neptune on Tuesday 6 December. Weather permitting, this event will be seen over a swathe of the Western Hemisphere including the northeastern USA, eastern Canada, Greenland, Iceland and the western British Isles.
On 31 January we experience the second full Moon of the month, which by one definition makes it a Blue Moon. However, for observers in north-western North America, Oceania, East Asia or central and eastern Russia, this full Moon will have a decidedly reddish hue since it will be immersed in the Earth’s shadow during a total lunar eclipse.
If you chance upon a bright ‘star’ crawling across the sky in an arc from west to east, an object that doesn’t flash or possess red and green running lights (which is an aircraft), then you can be fairly certain that you’re looking at the International Space Station (ISS). Find out when and where to see it from the British Isles and Western Europe this week.
