Total Lunar Eclipse

Last Saturday, I caught my very first Lunar eclipse at Bishan Park with the usual suspects. The sidewalk started at 2pm when the guys were doing solar sidewalk for the public. I wasn't there at that time due to work commitment. I took a cab there after work and reached at about 5.30pm. As I was walking to the park, I saw both Gary and James unloading equipment from James' car. I rushed over to help.

Hazrie, Ava, Dave, John and Alfred were already at the park's Macdonald's. The guys who were doing solar astronomy earlier have kept their solar observing equipment and were ready to setup for the Lunar eclipse viewing.

Ava and I went for our dinner nearby and we volunteered to get bottles of water for the rest of us for the event. As we were about to finish dinner, it started to pour heavily. We thought it was a good thing that it started raining now rather than later when the even starts. We waited for the rain to subside before returning to the park with bottles of water.

When the drizzling stopped at about 7.30pm, I started to deploy my Skymaster 15x70 binoculars. Alas, the rain clouds lingered when the maximum eclipse occured at 8pm. We only caught the first glimpse of the Moon at 8.30pm and the maximum eclipse was already over. Nonetheless, it was still a beautiful sight watching the Moon coming out of Earth's shadow. There were many people queuing up to take a look through our telescopes and binoculars. The Moon moved out of Earth's shadow completely at 9.45pm and a gorgeous full Moon was in view.

What truly made my night was when a kind lady got me some light bites from Macdonald's as a gesture of thanks. After the event ended, I told Dave and Haz about the lady and they were like, "Why didn't you get her number?!" Hahaha.

Common question that most of us got from the public all night was, "Why is the Moon red?"

I call that a very successful event with a massive turnout. Our Facebook page, Singapore Sidewalk Astronomy, hit a new milestone of over 1000 Likes!

Just as I was packing up, Jason called and told me that he and Junwei saw the maximum Lunar eclipse earlier at 8pm. His location at Katong wasn't blocked by clouds. Good for them!

The next total Lunar eclipse that's visible in Singapore will take place in 2018.

Photo credits to Hazrie, Dave, and Foo Chuan Wei.