Explanation:
Just opposite the setting Sun, the already-eclipsed Moon rose
over the Hawaiian Islands on February 20.
A view near the 14,000 foot peak of volcanic
Mauna Kea
on the Big Island, a
popular spot
for astronomers,
offered
this remarkable play
of shadows and sunlight.
With snowy cinder cones in the foreground, the Moon
lies within the
shadow cast by the mountain --
a shadow extending
across a lower cloud deck and on through Earth's dense atmosphere.
As the lunar eclipse
is drawing to a close, the curved shadow
of the limb of planet Earth itself can also be traced across the
Moon's surface, some 400,000 kilometers away.
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