Welcome to the
extra day
in the
Gregorian Calendar's leap year 2008!
To celebrate, consider this grid of lunar eclipse pictures - starting
in leap year 1996 and ending with February's eclipse -
with
the date
in numerical year/month/day format beneath each image.
Mostly based on
visibility from a site in Turkey, the 3x4 matrix
includes 11 of the 13 total lunar eclipses during that period,
and fills out the grid with the partial lunar eclipse
of September 2006.
Still, as the pictures are at the same scale, they illustrate
a noticeable variation in the apparent size of the eclipsed Moon caused by
the real change in Earth-Moon distance around the
Moon's
elliptical orbit.
The total phases are also seen to differ in
color
and darkness.
Those effects are due to changes in cloud cover and dust content in the
atmosphere reddening and refracting sunlight into
Earth's shadow.
Of course, the next chance to add a total
lunar eclipse
to this grid will come at the very end
of the decade.
