We need us some blood moon!

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On September 15 next year, Britain will witness an extraordinary sight. High in the heavens, the Moon will turn an eerie blood-red — filling the night sky with fiery radiance, as if Mars, the planet of war, has suddenly burst from its natural orbit and arrived on our doorstep.

This spectacular vision will be the culmination of a rare — and, in the eyes of some, deeply ominous — astrological event, which began this week.

On Tuesday, millions of people across America and much of the rest of the Western hemisphere saw exactly such a blood-red moon glowing above their heads for around an hour-and-a-half. That same moon will return over Earth three times in the next 17 months, making its final dramatic appearance over Britain.Astronomers call this run of red moons a ‘tetrad’ but some doom-mongers have a different name for it: the End of the World. They insist that between the first and last eclipse, the world will be plunged into a cataclysmic downward spiral predicted by the Bible.

This decline presages Armageddon, the arrival of the Anti-Christ and the Second Coming of Christ. Forget rising sea levels, the Mayan calendar and Nostradamus — this is the big one. ‘There will be signs in the Sun, Moon, and stars… now when these things begin to happen, look up and lift up your heads, because your redemption draws near.’ So said Jesus in Luke’s gospel.In times gone by, people were understandably terrified of these ‘blood moons’. Our ancestors greeted these infrequent and inexplicable arrivals in the night sky as harbingers of disaster or great change.

As superstition gave way to greater scientific understanding in the 15th century, scientists discovered the Earth orbits the Sun, and the Moon spins around the Earth.A blood moon, they came to realise, occurs when the Sun, Earth and Moon align, and the Moon slips into the Earth’s shadow. It doesn’t darken completely because some sunlight still reaches it after passing through the Earth’s atmosphere. But the light — and therefore the Moon — takes on a reddish hue.

However, there are still many who have looked upon this week’s moon with apprehension. For Tuesday’s was a very special one. It was the first of four consecutive total lunar eclipses, with no partial eclipses in between.

Rational-minded astronomers will point out that while such tetrads are rare, they are not unheard of. And they have never yet heralded the end of days. Indeed, there have been 62 since the First Century AD. Ah, counter the prophets of doom, but this one is different. This particular tetrad coincides with two of Judaism’s holiest days. And the Jews, the Holy Land and God’s Chosen People, inevitably figure large in the Biblical predictions of the Apocalypse.

This week’s eclipse coincided with Passover, the most important festival in the Jewish calendar, as will the third eclipse, which falls on April 4 next year. The second and fourth eclipses, on October 8 this year and September 15 next year, both fall on Sukkot, or the Feast of Tabernacles. So these eclipses are deemed to be especially significant. But there’s still more, say advocates of what has been dubbed the Blood Moon Prophecy.

According to a clutch of number-crunching American pastors, each of the last three occasions when tetrads have fallen over Passover and Sukkot coincided with traumatic events for the Jews. A tetrad in 1493-1494 came just after the 1492 expulsion of the Jews from Spain, while a 1949-1950 tetrad followed just after the establishment of the state of Israel and the first Arab-Israeli War. As for the most recent tetrad, in 1967-1968, it started just before the Six-Day War, when Israel was once again threatened by its enemies.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2607466/Moon-doom-This-weeks-blood-red-moon-signals-Armageddon-say-Bible-thumpers-Time-head-hills.html#ixzz2zGqClJTn

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