TOTAL Lunar Eclipse 2025
You are invited to join us to watch the total lunar eclipse with us from Observatory Hill. We’ll have warm drinks, talks and a lot of people with telescopes.
Weather permitting it will be a spectacular - but late - event. Here are the timings for the eclipse -
Come with warm clothing. Gates will open at 8:30pm. The auditorium program will start after 9pm
Eclipse Starts: 8:57pm 2025 March 13th
Totality: 11:26pm
Maximum: 11:58pm
Ends: 12:30am 2025 March 14th
Lunar Eclipses are governed by the Saros cycle, which is a period of 18 years 11 days and 8 hours in which the eclipses repeat themselves. It is, incidentally, the cycle which governs solar eclipses too. It’s the period over which the moon’s orbit tilts above and below the Ecliptic, which is the plane of the solar system. The Saros cycle was discovered by the Chaldeans in antiquity.
When the moon is just on the Ecliptic at Full Moon , a Lunar Eclipse may occur. If the moon is exactly on the Ecliptic at New Moon, a Solar Eclipse will occur. Because the Earth is close and much bigger in size than the moon, Lunar eclipses are long, lasting a couple of hours. Because the sun is so much further away and therefore the moon casts a small shadow on the earth, Solar Eclipses are short, lasting only a few minutes.
The extra ‘8 hours’ in one cycle moves the eclipses by one third of a day. Thus if a lunar eclipse occurs somewhere in the evening, the next instance 18 years or so later will happen towards the early morning, so be not visible in the same location on Earth (since it will be daytime there).
There are four eclipses in a single Saros cycle. This one is the first of the cycle, with the others not being visible in North America.