‘Blood moon’ seen on South Shore

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Three weeks before Halloween, the surface of the moon turned blood red.

Or so it looked to Earthlings. The moon’s normally pale luminescence became wine-stained during a total lunar eclipse, which lasted from 6:25 to 7:24 a.m. Eastern Time on Oct. 8.

For those 59 minutes, the Earth came between the sun and the moon, casting the moon in the fiery glow of sunlight refracting around the Earth. A view of the Earth from the lunar surface would have included, at once, every sunrise and sunset in the world, according to NASA.

It was the second of four total lunar eclipses occurring this year and next, a phenomenon known as a tetrad. There were five tetrads in the 20th century and none in the 19th, 18th, or 17th centuries, according to NASA. There will be eight tetrads this century, the space agency reported.