‘Blood Moon’ Provides Dramatic Sights, and a Dose of Folklore

A lunar eclipse — or “blood moon,” as it has come to be known — captivated people around the world Friday, not only eclipse-chasers but also many with a healthy curiosity about astronomy.

It was the longest lunar eclipse of the century, said Rick Fienberg, spokesman for the American Astronomical Society.

That’s in part because the moon is at a point in its orbit farthest from Earth, which means it moved more slowly and thus took longer to pass through the Earth’s shadow, he said. It’s also because the moon moved almost directly through the center of the shadow, charting a longer path than the other eclipses this century.

“It’s not speed, it’s just geometry,” he said.

The eclipse was also rare in that Mars, which this month is making its closest approach to Earth, was also visible near the red moon.

“You will see brilliant, red Mars shining beneath it,” Fienberg said.

The nearly four-hour event was visible in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and parts of South America. Those in North or Central America will have to wait until January to watch one in person.

The entire moon was in shadow for 103 minutes. That’s about 15 minutes longer than the average eclipse, explained Francisco Diego, an astronomer and senior teaching fellow atUniversity College London.

The moon’s reddish tint originates from sunlight filtering through the particles in the Earth’s atmosphere.

“The blue light is scattered in all directions,” Diego said. “And then the red light is transmitted.”

It’s the same reason sunsets are red, he added.

While a modern-day lunar eclipse is generally a source of excitement, in ancient times a lunar eclipse was the last thing people wanted to see, said Ed Krupp, director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.

For centuries, a moon colored rusty red by the Earth’s shadow has been associated with danger, “a rip in the fabric of order,” he added.

Krupp, who has studied folklore about the cosmos and wrote a book on the subject, said cultures around the world have attributed the eclipse to a carnivorous creature devouring either the sun or the moon.

In China, it was a dog; in Myanmar, an evil spirit in the form of a frog or a toad; the Vikings spoke of two wolves.

The eclipse was also an omen.

Bernardino de Sahagún, a Franciscan friar who documented 16th century indigenous Aztec life, described the eclipse of the moon as a time when “women with child feared evil,” terrified that their unborn children “might be changed into mice.”

Even today, some of that fear lingers.

The phrase “blood moon” is relatively new, Krupp said, a term coined by evangelical ministers. It appears to have originated in 2008 when Mark Biltz, founder of El Shaddai Ministries in Washington state, said he had discovered a pattern among the lunar and solar eclipses that would signal the second coming of Christ.

In 2013, megachurch pastor John Hagee prophesied in the book “Four Blood Moons: Something Is About to Change” that a series of four lunar eclipses within 18 months would precede the rapture.

It was a prediction derived in part from the Bible, Revelation 6:12, which describes “a great earthquake” during which “the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the whole moon became as blood.”

“The apocalypse, by the way, did not arrive,” Krupp said.

But the term “blood moon” lived on. “Now every total lunar eclipse is called a blood moon,” he said.

But even with all of the science available to explain the origin of an eclipse, superstitions about the moon persist.

Krupp has even fielded calls from pregnant women wondering if the blood moon could be dangerous to an unborn child.

“You can go to any culture and you will find that an eclipse is really bad news, whether it’s the sun or the moon,” he said. “There is that thread of a kind of threat of harm.”