How ominous: a lunar eclipse on the eve of my birthday.It seems downright biblical. …Legendary.
…Impetuous.
…Homeric.
A little blurry, yes, but my camera was on maximum zoom and the Moon is 239,000 miles away!
In fact, according to this NASA site, it was during such a lunar eclipse, around 270 BC, that a stargazer named Aristarchus derived the Moon’s distance, extrapolating it from the duration of the eclipse. (This method was later improved by Hipparchus).
Another bit of trivia regarding the moon’s distance is that the Moon is slowly getting farther away! The Irish Scientist postulates that “if the Moon’s recession rate has been constant throughout geological time then the Earth-Moon distance 4500My ago would be half its present value.”
