SCIENCE

Experiment of the Week

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Lunar Eclipse
(4 March 2007)

If you stayed up late on Saturday night, maybe you were watching the moon. There was a total lunar eclipse, the first for 4 years. This gives us an excellent opportunity to study the movement of the Earth, Sun and Moon.

Fig 1, photographed by us on Saturday night, shows the Earth’s shadow gradually moving across the Moon as the Earth comes into a direct line between the Sun and Moon and prevents the Sun’s light reaching the Moon’s surface. Figure 2 shows the path the moon took.

Fig 1

Fig 2

Fig 3 shows the red appearance of the moon at the time of the full eclipse. We will use the BBC site at http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/scienceclips/ages/9_10/earth_sun_moon.shtml to see a model that demonstrates the relative movements of the three bodies.

Fig 3