The Earth “ate” the moon

12 Dec

On Saturday (2011 December 10th), many parts of the world, including Japan, could see a 月食 (full lunar eclipse).

A lunar eclipse occurs when the sun, earth and moon are all aligned in a straight line causing the moon to be completely hidden by the shadow cast by the earth.

In Japanese, it’s called 「月食」 (“Gesshoku“). The written characters could be literally translated to “Eaten moon” (hence my title for this post).

Before the moon was completely covered in the earth's shadow, some of the sun's reflected light caused the moon to appear red. (The picture was taken in Tokyo).

This photo shows the earth's shadow beginning to cover the moon. (Tokyo Tower is in the foreground).

Were you able to see the lunar eclipse where you live?

(The two photos in this post were found on Google Images. My camera’s not powerful enough to take such close-up shots of the moon.)

4 Responses to “The Earth “ate” the moon”

  1. Blue Shoe December 12, 2011 at 10:18 am #

    Heh, that’s pretty cool. I remember having seen that word in its kanji form a couple times before but never really thought about it. Eaten moon, indeed!

    Like

    • tokyo5 December 12, 2011 at 11:08 pm #

      Yeah, it’s a funny word, I think.

      Like

  2. musings December 12, 2011 at 7:21 am #

    The eclipse was too early in Hawaii. My husband woke up and took the photo on my header before he went for his jog. 🙂

    Like

    • tokyo5 December 12, 2011 at 11:06 pm #

      >My husband woke up and took the photo on my header

      It’s an excellent photo!

      Like

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: