Blood worm moon total eclipse Thursday night

Night owls rejoice.

A total lunar eclipse will happen above Minnesota starting at about 11 p.m. Thursday and continuing into early Friday morning.

We may be battling a layer of high clouds Thursday night above Minnesota. But there may be some breaks in the high cloud deck, and the cloud layer could be thin enough in places to catch glimpses of the show through the cloud layer.

Here’s the rundown on Thursday night’s blood worm moon total lunar eclipse.

Blood worm moon

Well there’s a moon name for you.

The blood worm moon total lunar eclipse is named blood because the moon will appear red. That’s because the sun’s rays will pass through Earth’s atmosphere and then be projected onto the moon’s surface.

It’s essentially Earth’s sunset projected into the moon. Earth’s atmosphere scatters out other light colors but the reddish wavelengths are good at penetrating our atmosphere.

Here’s a good description from NASA:

A lunar eclipse occurs when the Sun, Earth, and Moon align so that the Moon passes into Earth’s shadow. In a total lunar eclipse, the entire Moon falls within the darkest part of Earth’s shadow, called the umbra. When the Moon is within the umbra, it will turn a reddish hue. Lunar eclipses are sometimes called “Blood Moons” because of this phenomenon.

Why does the Moon turn red during a lunar eclipse?

The same phenomenon that makes our sky blue and our sunsets red causes the Moon to turn red during a lunar eclipse. It’s called Rayleigh scattering. Light travels in waves, and different colors of light have different physical properties. Blue light has a shorter wavelength and is scattered more easily by particles in Earth’s atmosphere than red light, which has a longer wavelength.

Red light, on the other hand, travels more directly through the atmosphere. When the Sun is overhead, we see blue light throughout the sky. But when the Sun is setting, sunlight must pass through more atmosphere and travel farther before reaching our eyes. The blue light from the Sun scatters away, and longer-wavelength red, orange, and yellow light pass through.

During a lunar eclipse, the Moon turns red because the only sunlight reaching the Moon passes through Earth’s atmosphere. The more dust or clouds in Earth’s atmosphere during the eclipse, the redder the Moon will appear. It’s as if all the world’s sunrises and sunsets are projected onto the Moon.

Worm moon

The term worm moon comes from springtime and the increased worm activity. NPR elaborates:

A full moon in March has historically been known as a worm moon, according to The Old Farmer's Almanac.

That may be due to the emergence of earthworms around this time of year, as the weather warms up and spring nears.

But the publication offers another explanation for the name: in the 1760s, Captain Jonathan Carver documented that some Native American tribes used it to mark the appearance of beetle larvae from thawing tree bark.

Other names given to the March moon by various Native American tribes include the Eagle Moon, the Goose Moon, the Crow Comes Back Moon, the Sugar Moon, the Wind Strong Moon and the Sore Eyes Moon, the Almanac said.

Here’s the eclipse timeline from timeanddate.com: