The moon will turn red on Mar. 3. The Earth will stand perfectly in-between the sun and moon creating the first total lunar eclipse visible this year. Starting at 6 p.m., the Orchard Hill Observatory will open its doors to curious students. This rare event lasts only two to three hours, but will go through a couple of different stages. When the people of Amherst see it, the eclipse will have been already happening for a few hours. So when the sun sets and the moon rises, it will already be in full force. A full lunar eclipse only happens once or twice a year. A couple of things have to happen perfectly in order for us to see it. Ross Dubois, the man in charge of the observatory, explained it well. He grabbed a plastic cup that was lying on the cement floor and a flashlight off the shelf. "A good thing about astronomy is that you can use almost anything to demonstrate," said Dubois. The massive telescope in the middle of the room was the sun. The plastic cup was the Earth and the flashlight was the moon. The cup revolved around the telescope. The flashlight revolved around the cup. The telescope "emits light." When the flashlight gets in between the telescope and cup, the cup can't see the lighted side of the flashlight. But as the flashlight rotates, the cup can gradually see more and more of the lighted side of the flashlight. When the cup can see all of the lighted side of the flashlight, that is our full moon. However, the flashlight doesn't move perfectly around the cup. It rotates at a five-degree angle (the trick to remember here is that everything is on a three dimensional plane). So once or twice a year, the flashlight moves perfectly into the shadow of the cup, giving us our lunar eclipse. But the moon will be a "midnight wine red" that night. This is all thanks to prisms. "Have you ever seen the cover of the Pink Floyd album 'Dark Side of the Moon?'" asked Dubois. The cover shows a triangle (a prism) that has a ray of white light coming in on one side with red, yellow and blue coming out the other. The sun gives off that ray of white light and our atmosphere acts as the prism. Only our atmosphere doesn't allow blue light to pass through, so the red and yellow colors will be reflected onto the moon that is in the Earth's shadow, giving it its red tint. The moon won't be the only thing interesting in the sky that night. "Saturn is always a show stopper," said Dubois. On any given clear Thursday night, the observatory is open for visitors from 7:30-9:30 p.m. They regularly have about 60 students come up to see the stars. Dubois undertook the project of running the observatory only a year ago and has already begun to make some improvements. The lunar eclipse will be the second event that the Observatory has held. The first was the meteor shower on Dec. 14, 2006. An estimated 200 students showed up to gaze at the Geminid meteor shower. There were supposed to be about 70-80 meteors per hour but because of poor conditions, students only got to see approximately ten per hour. "I don't think people left disappointed though," said Dubois. Getting 200 people to the top of Orchard Hill in the middle of December isn't an easy task for one man. Dubois is trying to make the observatory much more apart of the UMass campus. "We think [the telescope] is about 40 years old," said Dubois. Rust stains line the crevices and more than one part of it doesn't work quite right. A function that is suppose to rotate the telescope at the same rate as the night sky only stays on track for about five minutes. As he closes the small circular brick room before he leaves, Dubois throws a large clear tarp over the telescope so that the rain or snow that leaks through the crack in the dome doesn't ruin it. He is currently looking to get a grant for a new telescope.
Daily Collegian > Arts & Living
Observatory prepares for lunar eclipse
Published: Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Updated: Tuesday, February 3, 2009
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