Rare Sightings

I stayed up to see a rare sight tonight...A Winter Solstice Lunar Eclipse" .

The following tells you just how long we will have to wait to see another one...

(This was taken from NASA's website) This lunar eclipse falls on the date of the northern winter solstice. How rare is that? Total lunar eclipses in northern winter are fairly common. There have been three of them in the past ten years alone. A lunar eclipse smack-dab on the date of the solstice, however, is unusual. Geoff Chester of the US Naval Observatory inspected a list of eclipses going back 2000 years. "Since Year 1, I can only find one previous instance of an eclipse matching the same calendar date as the solstice, and that is 1638 DEC 21," says Chester. "Fortunately we won't have to wait 372 years for the next one...that will be on 2094 DEC 21

Here are a few photos I snapped while chatting with the folks on the WVEC Eagle Chat (Thanks for the reminder, Sioux!)

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