Attention all fans of the celestial sky! Another spectacular event is coming up fast, but you won’t need solar glasses to see this one. It’s going to be a super blue blood moon! If you caught the solar eclipse on August 21, 2017, that was an amazing sight to see because the last time it occurred in the United States was 1979.  If that impressed you, then you better make sure you are up between 4 and 6 a.m. tomorrow, January 31, 2018, to see an event occur again for the first time in approximately 150 years! To put that in perspective, Andrew Johnson, the 17th president of the United States, was in command during what is known as the reconstruction era (1865-1869).

In order to better understand what is going on, we need to look at each event that will be occurring tomorrow morning. First, let’s look at the super part. A supermoon is when the moon is a full moon and its orbit is closest to earth in its cycle (the perigee). This allows more light reflected by the moon to reach the surface of the planet. That makes the moon appear much brighter and larger in the night sky. The second part, the blue moon, is just fancy talk for what is known as the second full moon of a month. Normally, only one full moon occurs every month but there are a few times when the moon’s cycle is able to loop twice. The third part, the blood moon, is once again fancy talk for when a moon is in a lunar eclipse. A lunar eclipse is when the earth comes in between the moon and sun, blocking most light from reaching the moon. This can only occur during a full moon, and when it does occur, anyone on the night side of the planet is able to observe a reddish tint being given off by the moon, giving it the name the blood moon.

Under normal circumstances, any one of these single events occurring on their own is not that much of a big deal. In fact, most of these celestial events occur multiple times throughout the year. What makes this one event so special, is that each of these events all lined up on the same day in the same time period. Once again, the last time this happened was around 150 years ago during the reconstruction era in the United States. It has indeed been a very intriguing year for not only celestial fans, but for people all over the world during the last few months, ranging from the solar eclipse to the asteroid passing by only 4.4 million miles away, to this. If you want to see this event, it is visible from anywhere in the continental U.S. and some parts of Canada. It will occur between 4:00 and 6:00 in the morning, east coast U.S. time. The stars above indeed have intrigued making since the very beginning, as it was said in The Republic, by Plato in 342 B.C.E., “Astronomy compels the soul to look upward, and leads us from this world to another.”