The wait is growing for the second Supermoon of the year, the event in which the celestial body can appear a little larger and brighter than usual. The phenomenon, which coincides with the minimum distance of our satellite from the Earth, has already taken place on August 19th. This time, however, the event will be double: in the early hours of September 18th, in fact, there will also be a partial eclipse visible from Italy, which will see the Moon partially obscured by the cone of shadow cast by our planet.
Fans will be able to follow the event live thanks to the National Institute of Astrophysics, which will broadcast on the YouTube, Facebook and Instagram channels of EduInaf starting at 19:30, and the Virtual Telescope Project, which will be on its website starting at 02:30. The event organized by Inaf will broadcast the images of the Moon taken with the telescope together with astronomers connected from Cagliari and Palermo.
Special guest Valentina Galluzzi , planetary geologist of the INAF and member of the Janus instrument team aboard the Juice mission of the European Space Agency: thanks to her it will also be possible to admire the suggestive shots taken by the probe during the recent maneuver that, between August 19 and 20, brought it to fly over the Earth and the Moon in the first stage of its long journey towards Jupiter and its moons. The partial lunar eclipse, on the other hand, will be visible from Italy between 02.40 and 06.40 approximately, with the maximum darkening expected around 04.44: the Virtual Telescope will film it live with its instruments installed in Manciano, in the province of Grosseto, under the darkest sky of peninsular Italy.
"It is a precious opportunity to admire our natural satellite in the context of the night sky, an increasingly neglected and forgotten landscape - comments Gianluca Masi, astrophysicist and scientific director of the Virtual Telescope - and to invite to recover, in general, its awareness among the general public even in the city, notoriously not very favorable to the vision of the stars due to light pollution".
(Unioneonline/vf)
