Last Blood Moon Until 2029: Set Your Alarm Tuesday

I was just thinking about how Shakespeare used eclipses as omens. Gloucester in King Lear blamed "these late eclipses in the sun and moon" for everything falling apart. Othello imagined a "huge eclipse" darkening the sky to match his guilt. In their world, a red moon meant the universe itself was stained.

In 2026, our chaos is just the alarm clock. Well, mostly.

Early Tuesday morning, March 3, the moon will slide into Earth's shadow and turn deep red. A total lunar eclipse, or what pop culture has branded the "blood moon." It's the last one visible from the United States until 2029, which makes it rare enough to justify losing an hour of sleep. But whether you actually see it depends entirely on where you're standing and whether you know your moonset time.

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Let me explain.

Three Eclipse Experiences in One Country

Here's the thing about lunar eclipses: they're not like solar eclipses with their narrow path of totality. If the moon is above your horizon, you can see at least part of the event. What changes is how high it sits in your sky and which phases happen before moonrise or after moonset.

For this eclipse, North America splits into three viewing zones:

• Prime Zone (The Full Show): Western North America, the Pacific, Hawaii, eastern Australia, New Zealand. You get the entire sequence. Penumbral creep, partial phases, full totality, the works. High in a dark sky.
• Middle Zone (Still Great): Central U.S. and Canada. Think Denver, Dallas, Chicago, Winnipeg. You'll catch totality and maximum eclipse, even if you miss a couple of the opening or closing acts.
• Edge Zone (Horizon Drama): Eastern North America. New York, Boston, Toronto, Miami. You'll see the moon reach totality very low in the west, then lose it into moonset. For many viewers here, the red phase will only be visible for about 20 to 30 minutes. That's one coffee break. One song on repeat. Blink and you'll miss it.

NASA's visibility map makes it clear: the eclipse doesn't stop happening for east coast viewers. The horizon just swallows it before the show ends.

Why the Moon Turns Red (Instead of Disappearing)

Let's zoom out for a second. A total lunar eclipse happens when the sun, Earth and moon line up so perfectly that Earth's shadow (its umbra) completely covers the moon. You'd think the moon would just vanish, right? Go dark?

But Earth has an atmosphere. And that atmosphere bends and filters sunlight, stripping out the blue wavelengths and letting the red and orange light spill into the shadow. The result: the moon glows a deep, coppery red. The same color as all the sunrises and sunsets happening around Earth's edge at that moment, projected onto the lunar surface.

It's gorgeous. It's eerie. And it's completely safe to watch with your naked eyes, binoculars or a telescope for the entire event. No special filters required.

The eclipse unfolds in stages:

• 3:44 a.m. EST (12:44 a.m. PST): The moon enters Earth's penumbra, the outer part of the shadow. The dimming is subtle at first.
• 4:50 a.m. EST (1:50 a.m. PST): Partial eclipse begins. The moon moves into Earth's umbra and it starts to look like a bite is being taken out of the lunar disk.
• 6:04 to 7:03 a.m. EST (5:04–6:03 a.m. CST, 4:04–5:03 a.m. MST, 3:04–4:03 a.m. PST): Totality. The entire moon glows red. The deepest color happens around the midpoint.

The full event, from first penumbral contact to last, spans more than five and a half hours. Most of us won't stay up (or get up) for all of it. The question is: which part should you catch?

Your Alarm Clock Strategy

Here's where it gets practical, and where the app becomes your best friend.

If you're on the west coast or in Hawaii: Set your alarm for about 20 minutes before totality begins (around 2:45 a.m. PST). You'll have the whole hour to watch the moon darken, go red and slowly brighten again. All high overhead in a fully dark sky.

If you're in the central U.S.: Set your alarm for just before totality starts (around 4:45 a.m. CST). You'll catch the entire red phase from 5:04 to 6:03 a.m., with the deepest color around 5:33 a.m.

If you're on the east coast: Here's where it matters most. Open the app right now. Tap into the Sun and Moon section and find your exact moonset time for Tuesday morning. Compare that to when totality begins in your time zone (6:04 a.m. EST). If your moonset happens before totality ends at 7:03 a.m. (and for most east coast cities, it does), your viewing window is the 20 to 30 minutes starting at 6:04 a.m. That's it. That's your shot.

And you'll need a clean western horizon. If buildings, trees or hills block that direction, you may not see the red phase at all.

Cloud Cover and the Southwest Advantage

Let's talk weather, because all the alarm clocks in the world won't help if clouds roll in.

Clear-sky climatology puts the U.S. Southwest and northwest Mexico among the regions most likely to have good viewing conditions before sunrise. The Pacific Northwest and parts of the northern Rockies also have decent odds.

The east coast? More variable. You'll want to check the hourly forecast the night before and have a backup plan, or at least manage your expectations.

We'll be pushing detailed cloud-cover maps and go/no-go alerts as the event approaches, because this is your last blood moon until 2029. Missing it because you didn't check the app would be, well, unfortunate.

From Omen to Forecast

Back to Shakespeare for a second. His characters treated eclipses as cosmic statements, and that line about "clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun" keeps echoing because it nails what a blood moon actually is: beauty with a flaw, somehow more striking because of it. A perfect full moon, marked by Earth's shadow, more beautiful because of the imperfection.

In video games, the red moon marks monster respawns (Zelda), eldritch nightmares (Bloodborne) or season-finale stakes (pick your anime). In young adult fantasy, it's prophecy night. In viral headlines, it's been stacked with every adjective the internet could find: "super blood wolf moon."

This one is simpler. A classic. A total lunar eclipse happening over your driveway, your parking lot, your balcony. If you're willing to set the alarm.

The Telescopic Perspective

Here's the thing about watching a blood moon: it won't make your inbox vanish. It won't solve the group chat chaos or fix whatever's broken in the news cycle. But it does offer something we don't get very often. A telescopic perspective.

For an hour or so, your problems shrink. The moon is huge. The shadow is slow. The only algorithm at work is gravity, and it's been running flawlessly for billions of years.

Somewhere, a kid is about to see the moon turn red over a school parking lot and quietly have their whole sense of the sky rewritten. Maybe that kid is you. Maybe it's your neighbor. Maybe it's no one, because everyone sleeps through it.

We don't get to choose why we're here, but we do get to choose whether we step outside when our local star, our planet and our most intimate celestial companion line up for something like this.

Your To-Do List

• Open the app. Find your moonset time for Tuesday morning, March 3.
• Set your alarm for 20 to 30 minutes before moonset (east coast) or before totality begins (everywhere else).
• Check the cloud forecast Monday night.
• Look low in the west. If your view is blocked, find a spot with a clear western horizon.
• Watch the moon turn red. No telescope required, though binoculars make it even better.
• Take a photo, or don't. Either way, you'll remember it.

The next total lunar eclipse visible from the U.S. isn't until 2029. By then, the moon will have drifted a tiny bit farther away. Still our most intimate celestial companion, still putting on a show, but inching toward some far future when this exact geometry won't work anymore.

Lucky us, arriving while it still does.

weather.com Content Development Manager, Joy Kigin, digs creating weather content that bridges the gap between data and your daily life. She's focused on helping you understand not just what's happening in the sky, but why it matters to you in ways that inform your decisions, impact your plans, and maybe even make you smile.