NEW YORK TIMES — Skygazers across the Western Hemisphere will be treated to celestial eye candy on Sunday night into early Monday morning as the full moon turns coppery red during a total lunar eclipse. It will be the only total lunar eclipse of the year, and that in itself should be reason enough to stay up late and marvel as the moon gets swallowed by Earth’s shadow.
You might have heard that this eclipse is also being called a “Super Blood Wolf Moon.” But as astronomers know, no number of edgy modifiers could make this display of cosmic clockwork any cooler.
Unlike a total solar eclipse, when the moon moseys between the sun and the Earth, it’s our planet that slides between the sun and the moon during a total lunar eclipse. As the Earth blocks the sun, only slivers of light make it through the planet’s atmosphere and to the moon.
…
“The ‘wolf’ part, it’s almost like this stereotypical, romanticized version of the native culture,” said Annette Lee, an expert in indigenous astronomy at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, who is also mixed-race Lakota.
The term, she said, is an oversimplification that sort of groups hundreds of distinct Native American tribes together into one blob. For example, the Ojibwe tribe — which historically lived around Lake Superior and is a part of the Algonquin-language family — called both the month of January and its full moon the “Great Spirit Moon,” she said. In their language, it is “Gichi-manidoo-giizis,” according to Ojibwe.net.
