2026 March 13 - Toolondo Totality Trails

0:00Greetings and welcome to the astronomy picture of the day podcast. Today's picture is titled to Londo Totality Trails. So what do we see here? Well here we're looking off over Lake Tolundo in Victoria, Australia here on Earth of course and we see up in the sky the lunar eclipse that occurred on March the third of this year. Now that was the total lunar eclipse that occurred this year and a total lunar eclipse occurs when the moon is full and passes directly into Earth's shadow. That blocks out the sunlight from directly striking the moon, making it get a lot fainter and in this case a lot redder as well. Now it gets redder because light does sneak through Earth's atmosphere so that Earth's shadow is not completely dark as it would be if we had no atmosphere and that gives the red color because the red light is better able to scatter through

1:05the atmosphere and into the shadow. Those longer wavelengths are more easily scattered than the shorter wavelength blue light. Now a total lunar eclipse the totality phase can take an hour or more and if you take an image during that time things are going to move. Not because things in the sky are moving that quickly they appear to move in the sky because Earth is rotating. So the Earth rotates from west to east making things appear to rise in the east and set in the west and that makes all of the objects including stars and the moon appear to move around the Earth once each day. Now we can see those trails here left behind over the course of the hour-long exposure bringing out even fainter stars allowing us to see those and to see their paths. Now as we look at them we will see and you can look towards the upper right and the lower left and see how the star trails are curved. Those would be the regions around the celestial

2:09poles and the stars as you look closer and closer to the poles would make smaller and smaller circles around them due to their pivot points of the poles. That is what everything appears to rotate around. So this is from Australia we would be seeing the south celestial pole up in the sky and the north celestial pole would be hidden beneath the horizon here. Now to bring out the detail of the moon there is one separate image that was then merged together later a detailed image of the moon that was taken at the end during the totality phase at that point and then merged in with the other longer exposure image. So to get this a couple of images were done again one long exposure bringing out all the detail in the star trails and then one short exposure to kind of punctuate where the moon happens to occur at the end here. So this was a chance to be able to see a total lunar eclipse in the only

3:11total lunar eclipse of the year. However there will be other eclipses in about six months as eclipse seasons occur about six months apart. So that was our picture of the day titled Toulondo Totality Trails. We'll be back again tomorrow for the next picture previewed to be perspective pi planet. So we'll see what that is about tomorrow and until then have a great day everyone and I will see you in class.