Bloody Moon

October 31, 2007

Moononfire_chriskotsiopoulos

Provided by: Chris Kotsiopoulos, Hellenic Amateur Astronomy Association
Summary authors & editors: Chris Kotsiopoulos, Jim Foster

"And I saw, when he had opened the sixth seal: and behold there was a great earthquake.
And the sun became black as sackcloth of hair: and the whole moon became as blood."
(Apocalypse 6:12 American Standard Version)

In many religions and beliefs throughout the course of human history, startling phenomena or events, like the appearance of a comet or a total solar eclipse, have often been regarded as bad omens. On the night of June 29, 2007, the Moon above Athens, Greece appeared decidedly ruddy, even well after moonrise. A huge fire in a nearby forest was responsible for its intense color -- the image colors shown here are real. Small smoke particles scatter the shorter wavelengths of light (blues and greens) more efficiently than do larger smoke particles, thus the Moon's disk on this spooky night was rendered a color somewhere between blood red and pumpkin orange.

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