Ruddy Blink

The pale full moon turned rufous early one morning last week. The earth had eclipsed it. The moon and earth have no light of their own. Both reflect light from the sun. The moon looks yellow because it has no atmosphere to screen the sun's rays and hide its general brownness.-- (The earth's atmosphere makes the earth shine blue and 40 times more brightly than the moon.) When the moon gets between the earth and the sun and totally eclipses the sun, as it will next Aug. 31, the swift path of the moon's shadow is black.f But when the ball of the earth gets between sun and moon, as last week, sunlight niters through the fringe of the earth's atmosphere and is refracted into the shadow which the earth throws upon the eclipsed moon. Red predominates in that refracted light, because red most easily gets through our air. That, also, is why sunsets are ruddy.

*Professor V. S. Forbes of Cambridge University thinks that the moon is not dead & cold, that radioactive substances keep it warm. /-This August's will be the last total solar eclipse visible from the U. S. until 1979. Observers in New England and southeastern Canada will see totality for 1.5 min. Maximum possible duration of a total solar eclipse is 7.5 min. During a total eclipse the moon's shadow slides across the earth at from 1,060 to 5,000 m. p. h., depending upon its distance from the Equator and the sun's position in the sky.

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