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English: A diagram illustrating the difference between a full moon and a lunar eclipse, and the difference between a new moon and a solar eclipse. This is caused by the 5° incline of the moon's orbital plane around earth, meaning that an eclipse can only happen when the moon is nearly in line with the nodal line.
The rarity of today's event has many curious about the nature of eclipses and the difference between the two kinds.
The mid-infrared image of the Moon was taken during the September 1996 lunar eclipse by the SPIRIT-III instrument aboard the orbiting Midcourse Space Experiment (MSX) satellite. On the Moon, they are seen as solar eclipses. At these wavelengths, MSX was able to characterise the thermal (heat) distribution of the lunar surface during the eclipse.
Unlike a solar eclipse, which can only be viewed from a relatively small area of the world, a lunar eclipse may be viewed from anywhere on the night side of Earth. A total lunar eclipse can last up to nearly two hours (while a total solar eclipse lasts only a few minutes at any given place) because the Moon's shadow is smaller.
A solar eclipse appears when the moon stands between the Sun and the Earth, blocking the sunlight from our perspective on Earth when we look up at the giant star. Solar eclipses occur on a new moon.
The term eclipse is most often used to describe either a solar eclipse, when the Moon's shadow crosses the Earth's surface, or a lunar eclipse, when the Moon moves into the Earth's shadow. However, it can also refer to such events beyond the Earth–Moon system: for example, a planet moving into the shadow cast by one of its moons, a moon ...
Unlike a total lunar eclipse, a partial lunar eclipse occurs when the sun, moon and Earth are in an imperfect alignment and there is only a small portion of the moon covered, per NASA. The second ...
This causes an eclipse season approximately every six months, in which a solar eclipse can occur at the new moon phase and a lunar eclipse can occur at the full moon phase. Total solar eclipse paths: 1001–2000, showing that total solar eclipses occur almost everywhere on Earth. This image was merged from 50 separate images from NASA. [37]