Super Flower Blood Moon Eclipse: A Stage-by-Stage Guide to May 2022's Total Lunar Eclipse

On the night of May 15th into the 16th, the moon will pass directly through Earth's shadow, and for roughly an hour and a half, it will glow in shades of red, orange, and brown—colors that depend entirely on conditions no one can fully predict until the moment arrives. This is the Super Flower Blood Moon, a total lunar eclipse that will unfold in twelve distinct stages, each one visible to anyone with clear skies and patience.

The eclipse begins long before the drama becomes visible. The moon first enters the penumbra, Earth's outer shadow, where sunlight still penetrates. For the first forty minutes, the full moon will look entirely normal. Only when the penumbra has covered roughly seventy percent of the lunar disk will observers begin to notice a subtle lightening on the moon's left edge—a faint smudge that deepens with each passing minute. This is not the main event. It is the overture.

Then the moon crosses into the umbra, Earth's dark central shadow, and the pace quickens. A small dark scallop appears on the moon's lower-left limb. The partial eclipse has begun. As the shadow creeps across the lunar face, something remarkable happens: the moon begins to glow. The portion immersed in shadow starts to shine dimly in orange, red, or brown. This glow comes from sunlight bent around Earth's atmosphere—every sunrise and sunset on the planet, refracted and concentrated onto the moon's surface. The curved edge of Earth's shadow, visible on the moon's face, was the same evidence Aristotle used in the fourth century B.C. to deduce that Earth is a sphere.

As three-quarters of the moon darkens, the umbral shadow reveals itself not as complete blackness but as a dimly glowing expanse. In binoculars or a telescope, the outer portions show lunar seas and craters. The center remains much darker. Colors vary wildly from eclipse to eclipse—reds and grays predominate, but browns, blues, and other tints appear without warning. Just before totality, a striking contrast emerges: a pale-yellow sliver of the moon's edge against the ruddy-brown disk behind it. Astrophotographers call this the Japanese lantern effect, a term coined in the 1950s.

When the last edge of the moon enters the umbra, totality begins. Now the moon is shining ten thousand to one hundred thousand times fainter than it was hours earlier. The upper portion appears darkest—deep copper or chocolate brown—while the lower portion glows brighter in reds, oranges, and sometimes soft bluish-white. The moon appears smaller and three-dimensional, almost translucent, suspended in a sky so dark that summer stars and the Milky Way become visible in ways they were not during the partial phases. The temperature on the moon's surface has plummeted from 261 degrees Fahrenheit to minus 146 degrees in just over an hour—a drop of 407 degrees, with no atmosphere to hold the heat.

But the moon's appearance during totality remains uncertain until it happens. The brightness depends on Earth's atmosphere. A clear sky means a bright eclipse. Volcanic ash in the stratosphere means darkness. In January 2022, the submarine volcano Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha'apai erupted in the South Pacific. Whether that eruption injected enough particles into the upper atmosphere to darken this eclipse is a question that cannot be answered until eclipse night itself.

For observers in western North America and Hawaii, timing is complicated by geography. In northwestern Oregon, western Washington, much of British Columbia, and Hawaii, the moon will rise already in total eclipse. Observers in these areas will have to wait for twilight to deepen and the moon to climb above the horizon before they see the darkened disk. In Hawaii, the first sighting may not come until the moon is already emerging from the umbra. In southeastern Alaska, only the emergence will be visible. For the rest of Alaska, the moon will be below the horizon for the entire event. Those with clear skies away from city lights will see something else: the stars. A retired NASA astronomer who watched a similar eclipse in 1982 noted his amazement at how brilliantly the summer Milky Way glowed once the moon's brightness no longer washed it out. The eclipse lasts roughly five hours from start to finish, but totality itself—the moment when the moon is completely inside the umbra—lasts only about eighty-five minutes. Then the shadow begins to recede, the Japanese lantern effect appears again, and the moon slowly returns to normal brightness. By the time the moon leaves Earth's penumbra, the show is over.