How To Watch Tonight’s Super Blood Moon In Australia

How To Watch Tonight’s Super Blood Moon In Australia

A super blood flower moon will be graving our skies tonight. And unlike the super pink moon, it’ll actually look like its name.

What’s A Flower Moon?

Despite its name, you won’t be seeing flowers on the moon, which is unfortunate.

It turns out every full moon has a traditional name applied that relates to the lunar month in which it occurs. The names stem from different ancient cultures, who named them after plants, animals or weather patterns around the same time.  The names are as follows:

  • January: Wolf Moon
  • February: Snow Moon
  • March: Worm Moon
  • April: Pink Moon
  • May: Flower Moon
  • June: Strawberry Moon
  • July: Buck Moon
  • September: Harvest Moon
  • October: Hunter’s Moon
  • November: Beaver Moon
  • December: Cold Moon

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What’s A Blood Moon?

A blood moon sounds like some real doomsday shit, and that’s not entirely incorrect.

The term was originally coined by some sects of Christian prophecy to describe a total lunar eclipse – which happens to make the moon look like it’s filled with blood.

Unfortunately, this means it’s far less metal than the name suggests, but it’s still a pretty cool astrological phenomenon.

The moon appears red during a lunar eclipse because of the way that light passes through the Earth’s atmosphere.

Blood moons really gained popularity around 2014, when two Christian pastors – John Hagee and Mark Biltz – used the term to describe the upcoming lunar tetrad (four total lunar eclipses, each separated by six lunar months), which they legitimately believed would mark the start of the apocalypse.

super blood moon
According to Google Trends, nobody cared about blood moons until 2014.

Obviously, the four blood moons came and went, and the world kept spinning as normal. We didn’t get an apocalypse, but we did get a new meme term – blood moon.

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What Is A Super Blood Moon?

A super blood moon occurs when we experience a total lunar eclipse when the moon is in perigee (aka – when it’s closest to Earth). To be more specific, the moon has to be within 361,766km of Earth to be considered a super moon.

As a result of its close proximity to Earth, a super moon is bigger and brighter than an average full moon. Generally speaking, they’re not that exciting because the regular ol’ moon is already pretty big and bright, but when combined with a total lunar eclipse, it looks pretty cool.

The super blood moon on May 26 is also the closest super moon of 2021, measuring at a distance of only 257,462km from Earth.

How And When To Watch The Super Blood Moon In Australia

The super blood moon occurs on May 26, 2021 in Australia. That’s tonight!

The total lunar eclipse will be fully visible from most of Australia this year, so it’s a great time to get outside and do some moon gazing.

Obviously, it’s all dependent on cloud cover and other visibility conditions that we won’t be able to predict until the date is much closer.

But at the moment, it looks like we’ll be able to view the full lunar eclipse for approximately 15 minutes.

Peak viewing time will be at 9:18pm (AEST), but the full cycle can be seen at the following times:

Penumbral Eclipse begins – 26 May at 6:47:39 pm AEST
Partial Eclipse begins 26 May at 7:44:58 pm
Full Eclipse begins 26 May at 9:11:26 pm
Maximum Eclipse 26 May at 9:18:42 pm
Full Eclipse ends 26 May at 9:25:54 pm
Partial Eclipse ends 26 May at 10:52:23 pm
Penumbral Eclipse ends 26 May at 11:49:44 pm

Can I watch it online?

You can! And we have instructions on how right here.


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