Set your alarms: A lunar eclipse will be visible from the Wasatch Back early morning Tuesday, March 3.
“The show will start officially just before 2 a.m. MST when the moon enters Earth’s rather faint and fuzzy outer shadow,” said Patrick Wiggins, who is a solar system ambassador to Utah for NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Look to the southwest around then and, as long as the sky is clear of clouds, you should be able to see it, even with Salt Lake City’s light pollution.
“That’s the neat thing about the (lunar) eclipse,” Wiggins said. “You don’t need any fancy equipment. You just walk out in your backyard and look at it.”
If 2 a.m. is too early (or too late), the main event is a bit later (or earlier): The eclipse will reach its maximum point, known as totality, at about 4:30 a.m., Wiggins said. That’s when the Earth will almost completely block the sun’s light that hits the moon, leaving it dark.
Totality will end at about 5:03 a.m. as the moon moves out of the dark part of Earth’s shadow, beginning the partial phase of the eclipse, expected to last for about another hour until 6:17 a.m. But by then, the moon will only be a few degrees above the horizon, and in Utah, the mountains may block that view altogether, Wiggins said.
There’s no way to tell what totality will look like until it happens. Even in the best circumstances, it’s rare that the moon is so dark that it can’t be seen.
“I’ve seen a lot of eclipses in my life,” Wiggins said. “I can think of two where the moon got so dark it basically disappeared.”
Instead, light usually leaks around the sides of the Earth to hit the moon and make it visible by outlining its edges. The character of that light determines the color and appearance of the totality. It could be yellowish, brown and coppery or, perhaps the most popular, “blood red.”
Finding out is part of the fun, Wiggins said, and it unfortunately ends up depending a lot on pollution, the condition of the Earth’s atmosphere at the moment totality occurs.
“We’ve had some really spectacular sunsets, right?” Wiggins said. “Think if you were on the moon during an eclipse, you would be seeing a ring of sunsets, in effect, all the way around the Earth, and so you’ve got this reddish color coming down toward the moon.”
But not all sunsets on Earth are that same color. They’re filtered through the atmosphere, distorting the color they’d seem otherwise. And even then, where you’re observing the eclipse can affect the appearance of that color, too, because human light pollution can drown out the color’s vibrancy and make the totality appear washed out.
Big eclipse heads may want to take a little trip west to put the region’s major source of light pollution behind them, Wiggins said. He certainly will be.
If anything, it’ll be a late night for the hobbyist astronomer, a total night owl who wakes during the night and sleeps during the day.
Wiggins is a former U.S. Air Force service member with a passion for astronomy. He retired from working at the Hansen Planetarium, now Clark Planetarium, in 2002 and has since worked as an ambassador for NASA. Essentially, his job is to get the public informed and excited about astronomical events such as Tuesday’s eclipse.
“I don’t get paid for astronomy, but I do a lot of astronomy research in my home observatory for various observatories around the world because the big observatories, they don’t have the time to basically the minutiae of the kind of stuff that a lot of us volunteers do,” he said. “We’re the data droids, if you will.”
Wiggins calls himself an amateur astronomer, modesty that betrays his contributions. He’s discovered minor planets and supernovae, and in 2014, Wiggins was awarded the Distinguished Public Service Medal, NASA’s highest civilian honor.
While a lunar eclipse isn’t as spectacular or as rare as a solar eclipse, they still excite Wiggins, even as somebody who’s seen more than his share of astronomical events. It’s like going to an art gallery, he said. Some people go out of their way to see great art. Well, Wiggins has been known to go long distances for his “beautiful stuff,” he said.
The last lunar eclipse visible from Utah was a year ago, last March. Next August will bring an “almost” total eclipse of the moon, and then the next total eclipse will be in 2029, along with a partial solar eclipse.
The next total eclipse of the sun for Utah will be in 2045.
“Mark your calendars,” Wiggins joked.