The Moon is in eclipse as I type. Difficult to photograph as it’s over the back of the garden fence and through the trees of the park, but this image looks nice. What you are seeing is the Moon slipping into the Earth’s shadow where it is lit only by all of the sunsets and sunrises on Earth: hence the coppery colour. Go out and see it while you can.
image courtesy of NASA
In the small hours of tomorrow morning, NASA’s LCROSS spacecraft will divide into two sections and crash into a dark lunar crater. The instrumentation probe will observe the impact of the booster section into the lunar surface and identify the materials excavated from deep under the regolith. Both impacts will be analyzed from the earth. NASA TV will be covering the event live and people with big telescopes will be able to watch it themselves.
There’s lots of detail on the LCROSS web site (http://lcross NULL.arc NULL.nasa NULL.gov/).
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