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February 9th, 2009 Penumbral Lunar Eclipse

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Check that set of data. Free! A useful overview of the February 9th, 2009 penumbral lunar eclipse, in a format easy to take on the field! click on the thumbnail!

2009 is featuring 4 lunar eclipses. Most however are penumbral and the other is partial. The February 9th, 2009 penumbral lunar eclipse is having the Moon transiting inside the Earth's penumbra, South of it, leading to the northern hemisphere of the Moon to get dim. There is a penumbral lunar eclipse occurring when the Moon, instead of being attained by the Earth's umbra, the darker of the Earth's shadow, is just affected, at the opposite, by the Earth's penumbra, the lighter part of the shadow. From the Moon, there would be a partial solar eclipse only anywhere on the Moon. for more about Moon eclipses, theoretically, see our tutorial: Moon Eclipses

A penumbral Moon eclipse is less spectacular than a total or partial one, as the dimming of the Moon may be harder to observer. It's a good show, worth the observation however. The whole of the eclipse is observable from Alaska and Hawai in the East, to northeastern India and past the Ural in Russia in the West. Regions from Scandinavia to eastern and southeastern Africa and the Middle East have the penumbral eclipse en cours when Moon is rising there as most of North America (the eastern USA, and eastern Canada excepted) have their observation of the eclipse interrupted by moonset. The eastern parts of North America, the whole of South America, the Caribbeans, westernmost Europe, the West and the southwest of Africa do not have any eclipse at all

The eclipse's main data are the following (data as of beginning of July 2009). 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): -0.0830
- penumbral magnitude (fraction of Moon's diameter immersed in the penumbra at greatest): 0.9244
- greatest eclipse: 14:38:16.5 UT
- eclipse semi-duration (penumbral): 02:01:25
- eclipse contacts (in UT): P1 at 12:36:50, P4 at 16:39:39

see a map of the February 9th, 2009 penumbral lunar eclipse (path of the Moon within the Earth's penumbra and map of the visibility of the eclipse worldwide) (41 ko). map courtesy Fred Espenak - NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, site NASA Eclipse Web Site

. for more about this eclipse and for more about solar and lunar eclipses generally, see Fred Espenak's NASA Eclipse Web Site

Observation Reports: no observation reports