Sky gazers alert! A partial lunar eclipse will occur on the intervening night of August 7, 2017, and August 8, 2018. It will be visible all over Asia, Africa and Europe. The eclipse will begin at 10:52 PM on August 7 and it will continue up to 12:49 AM on August 8.
“The entire partial eclipse will be visible from central and east Africa, central Russia, China, India, the Far East and most of Australia”, Ministry of Earth Sciences said in a statement.
According to the director of the Nehru Planetarium in New Delhi N Rathnashree, ‘the penumbral part of the lunar eclipse will be seen at 9:20 PM on Monday night till 2.20 AM the following morning. The partial eclipse will begin at 10:52 PM and last just under two hours. A penumbral eclipse occurs when the Sun, the Earth and the moon align in a straight line. When this happens, the Sun’s light is intercepted by Earth, and stopped from reaching the moon’s surface, thereby covering all or part of the Moon with the outer part of its shadow,’ PTI reported.
“The interesting thing about lunar eclipse timings is that anywhere on Earth from where the Moon is visible during the eclipse, the time will be the same. This is in contrast to a solar eclipse in which the timings of the contacts change as the location changes on Earth,” Rathnashree said in a statement.
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The good news is that the partial eclipse will be visible all across the country. Nehru Planetarium will be open for the visitors to view the lunar eclipse and its partial phases from 9 PM at the Teen Murti on the night of August 8.
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A partial lunar eclipse occurs when the Earth comes between the Sun and the Moon but only a fraction of the moon is in line with the other celestial bodies.
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