Get your inner lunatic out, this red jumma

For werewolves among you — lycanthropes, if you want to sound mature — Friday brings you glad tidings. If the sky is clear, you will be able to howl your heart out at the longest lunar eclipse of the century. Scheduled to last one hour 45 minutes, not only will July 27 provide the spectacle of the complete shadowing of the moon — our friendly neighbourhood satellite blocked out by Earth’s shadow — but to add some supranatural drama, it will be a ‘blood moon’. Vlad tidings, indeed.

The redness in the blood moon can be attributed, with a little imagination, to the green signal given to all kinds of supernatural beings, vampiric real estate brokers and spectral mutual fund managers included. But for the less bhootinclined, the redness on the lunar disc is because of a small amount of sunlight that will be refracted around the Earth that will land on the moon. And the longer the wavelength of this light — in the spectral stretch, red happens to have the longest visible wavelength — the less it will deviate, bathing Friday’s moon with an eerie red hue. For our readers on the Moon, what they will see is a terrestrial eclipse — the moon blocking the Earth and its shadow falling on the blue planet. For those lucky ET readers, the lunar sky has no chance of being obscured by clouds.