PHOTOS: Super ‘Blood Moon’ wows

A U.S. flag flies in the foreground of this image of the moon during the lunar eclipse as seen from Washington, D.C., on Sunday night (J. David Ake/AP)

A U.S. flag flies in the foreground of this image of the moon during the lunar eclipse as seen from Washington, D.C., on Sunday night (J. David Ake/AP)

The huge, red moon awed viewers across the Americas and parts of western Europe and Africa on Sunday night and early Monday morning.

It was the only total lunar eclipse of the year, a “blood moon” in which sunlight leaking around the edges of the Earth makes the moon appear red. And it was also a supermoon, when a full moon appears larger than usual because it has neared the closest point to Earth in its orbit.

Some people even hailed the lunar spectacle as a “super blood wolf moon,” or various permutations of those four words. That’s because “wolf moon” is the traditional name for January’s full moon.

The simultaneous phenomena made for a thrilling sight that lasted more than three hours from start to finish if you were lucky enough to see the whole thing:

The “blood moon” rises behind the Transamerica pyramid in San Francisco on Sunday (Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The red moon hangs above an industrial plant in Duisburg, Germany (Marcel Kusch/AFP/Getty Images)

The huge moon is framed in a statue in Sacramento, Calif. (Rich Pedroncelli/AP)
The moon is seen above the castle of Salgo, more than 60 miles northeast of Budapest, Hungary, during the eclipse early Monday
(Peter Komka/AP)

Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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