It's past midnight. You look up to the moon, there, always, in the sky. It makes you think of that dream scene from the Simpsons - it smiling down. But this time it's not smiling. It's not happy at all. It's glowing red and that can't mean anything good at all
"Oh moon, why have you forsaken us," there will come the cries at the end of July when the Earth's sole natural satellite chooses to shed its usual calming, luminescence glow in favour of something altogether more sinister.
The 27th of next month will see the longest lunar eclipse this century in the Eastern Hemisphere, lasting almost two hours and featuring a red tinge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxZSM8Vl8pk
Of course, the bad news is that numerous tabloid reports (including
The Express,
The Metro and
The Mirror) are claiming that the moons rebrand could actually mean the end of the world. Obviously.
Conspiracy theorists and evangelical Christians claim that the lunar eclipse could be a warning sign that doomsday is on the horizon.
A line in the Book of Joel 2:30-31 says: "And I will show wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke."
"The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and the terrible day of the Lord come."
While the Book of Revelations also contains a similar passage which reads: "And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood."
Far be it from me to attempt to debunk a book so widely believed and successfully interpreted as the Bible, but apparently, the red tint is actually due to Rayleigh Scattering. This effect is caused when sunlight entering the Earth's atmosphere strikes the particles of gas in the atmosphere.
Still, maybe it's actually the apocalypse, who knows...
