Lunar Eclipse Thursday Night Visible From Los Angeles

Thursday night the moon rose already bitten. Over Los Angeles it climbed out of the southeast just after 7:18 p.m., a pale disk with a dark notch already eating its edge. By 9:13 p.m. nearly all of it had slipped into Earth's shadow. Ninety-six percent of the face vanished into the umbra, and what remained glowed the color of old copper and dried blood.

Clouds kept arriving in ragged sheets. Griffith Observatory canceled the lawn viewing hours earlier, citing heavy cover and the chance of rain. Still the city looked up. Between breaks in the marine layer the red moon appeared and disappeared like a lantern someone kept covering with a hand. One moment it hung clear above the Hollywood Hills, a deep rust circle with a thin bright sliver along the bottom. The next it was only a smear of color behind moving gray.

People stood on rooftops in Silver Lake, on the sand at Santa Monica, on freeway overpasses that pointed east. Phones came out. A few telescopes. Most just stared. The light that reached the moon had traveled through every sunrise and sunset on Earth at once; the blues scattered away, the reds bent inward. Even through thin cloud the color held.

By 10:52 the darkest shadow began to slide off. The moon brightened again, first at the edges, then across the whole disk. The last of the penumbra faded just after midnight, already Friday, August 28. For a few hours the sky over Los Angeles had been half-hidden and still unmistakably red.

The next eclipse this deep will not return until 2029. Thursday's clouds did not cancel the show. They only made the moments it appeared feel borrowed.