Showy spectacle: Catching up with the super flower blood moon lunar eclipse in Ohio
Colorful May blooms are everywhere this month — even in the sky.
Night owls caught perhaps the biggest bloom of all if they looked up Sunday night between 10:30 p.m. and just before 1 a.m.
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It wasn't just any old lunar eclipse in the skies over Ohio.
The spectacle many witnessed overhead is called a super flower blood moon lunar eclipse.
Times-Gazette photographer Tom Puskar caught the show from his vantage point in Ashland County's Mifflin Township.
What is a lunar eclipse?
A lunar eclipse happens when the Earth is between the full moon and the sun.
During the eclipse, the moon receives only sunlight bent through the Earth's atmosphere, and changes color over the minutes, from gray to pink to orange to red.
The Earth's shadow covers the moon, which often has a red color, hence the blood moon nickname. Although it's completely in the shadow of Earth, a bit of reddish sunlight still reaches the moon.
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Just before 10:30 p.m. the eclipse began. The Earth's shadow creeped across the moon over the next hour.
We ended the day Sunday and began the new day with a total eclipse of the moon, which lasted from 11:29 p.m. to 12:53 a.m. Monday.
Unlike a solar eclipse, you didn't need anything special to view it other than the ability to stay up late.
This is the first of two lunar eclipses in 2022, according to Space.com. The next one will occur Nov. 8.
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What is a supermoon?
A supermoon means the moon looks a bit bigger than usual since it's a bit closer to the Earth.
"Because the orbit of the moon is not a perfect circle, the moon is sometimes closer to the Earth than at other times during its orbit," according to NASA.
On average, supermoons appear about 7% bigger and about 15% brighter than a typical full moon
The Old Farmer's Almanac reports that there will be four supermoons in 2022.
It's also the flower moon
The sky show that kicked off the work week is also called the flower moon, a name given to May's full moon because "flowers spring forth across North America in abundance this month," the Old Farmer's Almanac notes.
The full moon names used by the almanac come from a number of places, including Native American, Colonial American and European sources. Traditionally, each full moon name was applied to the entire lunar month in which it occurred, not solely to the full moon.
Other names for May's full moon include the corn planting moon and the milk moon, NASA said.
Doyl Rice of USA TODAY and Emily DeLetter of The Cincinnati Enquirer contributed to this report.
This article originally appeared on Ashland Times Gazette: See what the super flower blood moon eclipse looked like in Ohio
