Next Week, A Record-Breaking Over 7 Billion People Will See The Total Lunar Eclipse

Get ready for the Blood Moon next week! Our natural satellite will turn crimson as it is experiencing a total eclipse. It will happen during the evening between September 7 and 8 (depending on the timezone) and will be seen by an enormous number of people worldwide. The moon will first go black as the Earth's shadow covers it during the partial phase, before going full red, when it is completely eclipsed. The full event, from partiality to the full eclipse and then back to partiality, will take 3 hours, 29 minutes, and 24 seconds.

The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

Where Will The Blood Moon Be Visible From?

If you want to see the whole spectacle from start to finish (including the dimming of the penumbral phase), you have plenty of places to pick from. Most of Asia, a sliver of East Africa, and Western Australia will get the complete eclipse. The rest of Africa, Australia, much of Europe, and the east coast of Brazil will get at least part of the totality and the partiality.

You can check Time&Date.com for precise timings to see the eclipse at your location. 

How Is This Lunar Eclipse Record Breaking?

Thanks to the planetary alignment at the time of the eclipse, a record-breaking 7 billion people will be able to see the celestial event.  Obviously, weather permitting, but up to 60 percent of the world's population will be able to see the full eclipse, which is truly incredible.

If we consider at least partial views of the event, then the number goes up to 87 percent. We're sure people in the Americas will be annoyed that they were not invited to this party… let's consider it a cosmic retaliation for the first lunar eclipse of 2025, which took place in March and was basically an American exclusive.

For the March eclipse, the lunar mission Blue Ghost was on the Moon and operational at the time. It captured the incredible event as a solar eclipse, which you can see here. 

To consider a completely different record, the longest eclipse observation, and likely the one with the least spectators, happened back in 1973, where scientists used a Concorde plane to travel across the path of totality for 74 minutes.

Excitingly, the longest eclipse of this century is still to come. It will happen on August 2, 2027, and it will last around 6 minutes and 23 seconds.

How Do Eclipses Happen?

The orbit of the Moon is slightly slanted with respect to the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. If the two were the same, we would get a lunar and solar eclipse every month. Instead, they tend to happen more rarely, every six months or so (but certain years are better) when the Moon is at a node.

A node means that the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon are aligned or in syzygy. A total lunar eclipse occurs at full Moon when the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon line up, so the Moon passes completely within the shadow. There are partial lunar eclipses, where the Moon doesn’t fully enter the shadow, and penumbral eclipses when the Moon only crosses the half-shadow.

For the Sun, there are total eclipses when the Sun is fully covered, partial, when only a bit of the Sun is obscured, and annular, when the Sun is fully covered but the Moon is at its most distant point in its orbit, so it doesn’t look big enough to block the whole solar disk.

The total lunar eclipse is also known as the blood Moon because, once in the shadow of the Earth, it turns red. The reason for this is that sunlight filters through the atmosphere of the Earth, losing the blue colors, just like the sky at sunset and sunrise. Our planet's shadow has a bit of a crimson hue, coloring the Moon when no direct sunlight is reaching it.