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The Total Lunar Eclipse of January 21st, 2019

That first lunar eclipse for that year is the total lunar eclipse of January 21st, 2019. A total lunar eclipse if a fine show worth the observation, with Moon progressively occulted and darkened by Earth's 'umbra,' giving a deep sense of the astronomical scales of the Universe and the large events which may occur there. for more about Moon eclipses, theoretically, see our tutorial: Moon Eclipses. The total lunar eclipse of January 21st, 2019 is a usual total lunar eclipse, with the Moon's disk passing inside Earth's umbra! This is the last of three consecutive total lunar eclipses in 2018 and 2019, each one separated by six months (previous ones occurred on 2018 Jan 31 and Jul 27). The Moon's orbital trajectory takes it through the northern half of Earth’s umbral shadow as the Moon’s northern limb will lie 6.5 arc-minutes from the edge of the shadow. As a result, the southern half of the Moon will appear much darker than the northern half (it may be necessary to assign different Danjon values to different portions of the Moon e.g., North vs. South). In this eclipse, the Moon passes deeply into the umbral shadow leading to a relatively long total eclipse lasting 1 hour 2 minutes. During totality, some bright stars will be able to be used for magnitude comparisons like Procyon, Pollux, Castor, or Regulus

The entirety of the total eclipse will be seen for the whole of Americas, Greenland, Iceland, UK, or most of Scandinavia. Areas either part of that either will have the eclipse by moonrise, like from Alaska Aleutian Islands to southwestern Pacific Ocean, or the eclipse by moonset, like for central Siberia in Russia down to whole of Africa, or most of Europe. No eclipse is seen from Mongolia to India and Australia

The eclipse's main data are the following (data as of November 2018, EclipseWise.com). for more about how to observe a lunar eclipse, see our tutorial 'Observing a Moon Eclipse':
- umbral magnitude (fraction of Moon's diameter immersed in the umbra at greatest): 1.1953
- greatest eclipse: 05:12:18.0 UT
- eclipse duration (penumbral): 05h11m37s
- eclipse duration (umbral): 03h16m47s
- eclipse duration (total): 01h01m59s
- eclipse contacts (in UT): P1 (penumbral eclipse begins) at 02:36:29, U1 (umbral eclipse begins) at 03:33:55, U2 (total eclipse begins) at 04:41:19, U3 (total eclipse ends) at 05:43:18, U4 (umbral eclipse ends) at 06:50:42, P4 (penumbral eclipse ends) at 07:48:06

see a .PDF map for the total lunar eclipse of January 21st, 2019 (path of the Moon within the Earth's umbra and map of the visibility of the eclipse worldwide. map courtesy EclipseWise.com

. for more about this eclipse and for more about solar and lunar eclipses generally, you may see at the Internet, with Fred Espenak a reference in the domain