June 14: On Wednesday, at around midnight, the city and places across the country will witness one of the darkest lunar eclipses in nearly 100 years. The darkness is due to the ashes thrown into the Earth’s atmosphere by the recent eruption of the volcano Grimsvotn in Iceland, along with dust and ashes from last year’s volcanic eruption of the volcano Eyjafjallajokull, also in Iceland, according to astronomy experts.
H.R. Madhusudan, scientific officer, Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium explains, “The dust and ash particles from the volcano in the earth’s atmosphere will absorb the light from the sun and prevent it from reaching the moon. The intensity of the darkness will depend on the size of the particles. Since it is a total lunar eclipse this time, the Sun, Earth and Moon will be in one line, with the Earth in the centre.” A total lunar eclipse that occurred on December 9, 1992 was also exceptionally dark because on June 15 that year, Mt. Pinatubo check date — google search shows eruption in 1991 in the Philippines erupted for about nine hours during which it discharged something like 15 million tons of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, said Aravind Paranjpye of the of the Inter-University Centre of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune. He said the darkness of the eclipse can help scientists understand and quantify the amount of dust thrown into the atmosphere by the volcanoes.
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