Blood moon 2025: When will the total lunar eclipse peak in Kentucky?
KENTUCKY (FOX 56) — The 'worm moon' will appear to turn to blood early Friday, and Kentuckians aren't going to want to miss it wriggle into the shadow of the Earth.
According to NASA, the moon will start to enter the partial shadow of the Earth beginning at 11:57 p.m. on Thursday and will enter the full shadow around 1:09 a.m. The total lunar eclipse will peak at 2:26 a.m. and last until 3:31 a.m.
At totality, the moon will appear a bloodred hue due to the color-changing effect of light as it bends around the Earth's surface and atmosphere. In fact, if someone looked at the Earth from the surface of the moon, it would appear to be surrounded by a vivid ring of red light, according to space.com.
Stargazing enthusiasts should take note of the following timeline for the lunar eclipse for the best viewing experience:
11:57 p.m.: The moon will enter the outer part of the Earth's shadow, which will cause slight dimming.
1:09 a.m.: The partial eclipse begins, and a bite-shaped chunk of the moon will darken noticeably.
2:26 a.m.: Totality begins with the moon turning a copper-like red, and photographers should use a tripod and adjust settings to allow more light to enter the lens (longer exposure).
3:31 a.m.: Totality ends with the redness starting to fade out of the moon. It will again appear that a bite has been taken out of the moon as it passes out of the shadow, this time on the other side.
4:47 a.m.: The entire moon is still partially in Earth's shadow, and the brightness has not entirely returned.
6 a.m.: The eclipse is over.
Currently, the FOX 56 Weather Authority is calling for decent cloud cover and a chance for showers in the Lexington area ahead of a storm system that's expected to impact the area on Saturday.
Latest central Kentucky weather forecast
The 'worm moon' dates its origins to the Maine Farmers' Almanac, which began using Native American names for full moons in the 1930s, according to NASA. Lore states that the moon was named after the tendency of earthworm casts to appear as the ground thaws, often seen in March.
Blood moon 2025: When will the total lunar eclipse peak in Kentucky?
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NASA notes that other names for the March full moon include the 'crow moon' due to the common cawing of the crow to signal the end of winter, and the 'sugar moon' since this time of year is the best time to tap maple trees.
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Should it concern us that power and tech — and the power of tech — are so concentrated in so few hands and that Trump appears to be a Trojan horse for Silicon Valley's most neo-reactionary ambitions? Absolutely! Do we want America remade in the image of a tech startup by men who like to move fast and break things (especially when most of the systems they're breaking are ones that they, in fact, would never rely on)? Not I! But also: What is going on with this idea that humans should even want to live in space? What sort of lack of reality testing are we dealing with here? Musk, whose wealth has lately hovered well over $400 billion, has enough money that he could, should he desire, end world hunger and still have billions to spare. If Jeff Bezos had a mind to, he could eliminate homelessness in America and still be one of the richest people in the world. Yet of the half-dozen tech billionaires Trump displayed like trophies at his inauguration, most seem less concerned with the fate of the common American than they do with a sci-fi fantasy future that involves transhumanism, superhuman AI, and the survival of humanity as an interplanetary species (starting, perhaps, with launching Katy Perry into space). Which, truth be told, seems like more than just a moral failing. It seems … unhinged? Deranged? Batshit? At the very least, current circumstances might lead one to wonder: How the heck does someone get this way? And what does it mean for the rest of us? In 2011, a Berkeley grad student named Paul Piff conducted an experiment that has since become famous in the world of social psychology. Over the course of several weekends, Piff and his research team crouched behind bushes at the intersection of Interstate 80 and Lincoln Highway in Berkeley, California. When a vehicle passed, they would catalog it — 'five' for a brand-new BMW, for instance; 'one' for a beat-up Honda. Then the researchers would observe the behavior of the car's driver. For centuries, humans have studied and tried to understand our own hierarchies — how and why we arrange ourselves into tribes and nations and by what means certain groups and individuals rise to the top. But Piff had realized that we had little data on how wealth — a prime marker of power in our current times — affects the psychology of those who hold it. 'In the U.S., we spend a lot of time pathologizing poverty and valorizing aspects of the rich,' he tells me. 'I was really interested in the flip side of poverty: If poverty has these effects, then wealth must also, and let's start to try to uncover what those are. There must be some pathologies there too, right?' What Piff and his team found at that intersection is profound — and profoundly satisfying — in that it offers hard data to back up what intuition and millennia of wisdom (from Aristotle to Edith Wharton) would have us believe: Wealth tends to make people act like assholes, and the more wealth they have, the more of a jerk they tend to be. At the intersection the researchers were monitoring, drivers of the most expensive cars were roughly four times more likely to cut others off and three times less likely to stop for pedestrians, even when controlling for factors like the driver's perceived gender and amount of traffic at the time they were collecting data. When someone from the research team posed as a pedestrian heading into the crosswalk, almost half of the grade-five cars failed to stop, as if they didn't even see the person. 'People find the car study infinitely relatable,' Piff says now of this research, the results of which were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 'It's almost like science masquerading as allegory, or allegory masquerading as science.' For all the attention it has received, the car study was admittedly small, but other research has backed up its findings — and augmented them. Wealth makes you less generous (lower-income individuals have been shown to give a greater proportion of their income than wealthier ones), less compassionate (people with more money and status report less distress when confronted with another person's suffering), and more narcissistic. In a hilariously pointed study that was also included in the PNAS article, people primed to think of themselves as upper-class were more likely to take candy from a jar that they had been told was meant for kids in a nearby lab. In other words, they were more likely to literally steal candy from children. Yet the Berkeley team wasn't just interested in the correlation between assholery and wealth; it also was interested in causation: Were people with less empathy more likely to become wealthy, or did wealth tend to deprive people of empathy? To find out, Piff and his colleagues developed experiments in which the participants' status was artificially manipulated — making them feel higher or lower status — to see if there would be a behavioral effect based on that variable alone. In one such experiment, Monopoly players tossed a coin at the beginning of the game to determine who would be given an unfair advantage — starting with twice as much money, collecting twice as much when they passed 'go,' and rolling two dice at every turn instead of one. The results of the study were never published, but as videos of the experiment show, players with the advantage soon began displaying more dominant behavior, taking up more room at the table, moving their opponent's piece for them, even eating more pretzels from a shared bowl. Other researchers found that simply making subjects think about money (sitting them near a screensaver showing images of bills, for instance) had an antisocial effect: Subjects picked up fewer pencils that an assistant pretended to accidentally drop and arranged a stranger's chair further from their own. When it came to determining the mechanism behind this antisocial shift, researchers hypothesize that socialization itself is key. Wealthy people tend to have more space, literally and figuratively. They spread themselves out into bigger homes, they send their children to less crowded schools, they interact less with the hoi polloi and even, research has shown, with members of their own social class. 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The OG robber barons of the Gilded Age had found themselves confronted with a sociological — and psychological — situation that was distinct from that of most extremely wealthy people who had come before them. They did not head up armies. They were not divinely anointed. They were not manor born. They derived their power from money — and money alone — and the amount of money they had was basically unthinkable. According to historian David Nasaw, who has written biographies of Andrew Carnegie, William Randolph Hearst, and Joseph P. Kennedy, 'This new species of rich men needed some rationale, some moral justification for the accumulation of this wealth. They needed, in a very visceral, intimate sense, a sign that their wealth was not a matter of chance or crime or robbery, that they were not simply robber barons, but that what they were doing was beneficial to all of mankind.' 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'But you get phrases like 'make the world a better place' and 'move fast and break things.' Well, that's very Darwinian, because if you break things, if you have disruption, catastrophe, the hope is that the strong will survive. You don't have this crutch of a government allowing the losers and the weaklings to survive; you'll weed them out. And this idea is really big in Silicon Valley, this justification of the concentration of wealth and power based on this idea that they deserve it. How do you know they deserved it? Well, geez, look at how rich Elon Musk is.' In a certain sense, it's easy to buy into this (flawed) logic to one degree or another. Even plebeians can take comfort in the idea that there is justice in the world, that people get what they deserve, despite obvious and frequent proof to the contrary. But psychologists have found that wealthier people are significantly more likely to believe in nature over nurture, to think that traits are ingrained and immutable. And, surrounded by yes-men who don't call them on their bullshit, they are also more likely to have an inflated sense of their own abilities, to overstate the power of the traits they possess. While observations of the rigged Monopoly game proved informative, for instance, the Berkeley researchers noticed that the strangest thing actually happened after the game was over: When the 'rich' players were asked why they'd won, they didn't tend to mention the random coin toss that had given them the obvious advantage; they tended to credit their own abilities, the good, strategic choices they'd made. Even knowing that the game was rigged, they thought they'd earned, and therefore deserved, their victory. For someone with mega billions, this type of self-delusion could become mega pronounced. 'These guys think they're Superman, that they're genetically endowed with superior characteristics, and that their genes should populate the Earth,' says Dartmouth sociology professor Brooke Harrington, who studies the ultra-rich and has helped popularize the term 'broligarchy.' As Harrington points out, the messaging is pretty overt, from venture capitalist Marc Andreessen's 2023 'Techno-Optimist Manifesto' — which talked up such things as 'becoming technological supermen' and 'conquering dragons' — to Thiel's obsession with living forever and the fact that he named his data-mining company Palantir, after the far-seeing crystals in The Lord of the Rings. Then there's Musk's 'breeding farm,' as Harrington puts it, and his edgelord displays of dominance, like brandishing a chain saw at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference or doing what many perceived to be a Nazi salute at Trump's post-inauguration rally. Using his preferred form of social engagement, Musk recently reposted on X an argument that 'a Republic of high status males is best for decision making.' 'Interesting observation,' he commented, as if one could actually observe something that is patently untrue. (For what it's worth, I reached out to Musk, Thiel, Bezos, and Andreessen, none of whom responded.) Naturally, this grandiosity also extends to the tech elite's accelerationist agenda. Musk believes that in 20 years — and thanks to his own genius — a million humans will be living on Mars. (Never mind that his budget-travel version of spaceships keep exploding.) Bezos wants humanity spread throughout the solar system on enormous space stations (that a galactic Amazon presumably stocks). And Silicon Valley is steeped in the idea that all of this will come about thanks to the imminent arrival of artificial general intelligence (AGI), a point at which artificial intelligence equals that of humans and then iterates upon itself, growing exponentially more brilliant with every version. Once we reach this singularity — and assuming that the tech is aligned with the forces of good and not evil — we can rely on AI to solve any problem, from reversing aging to curtailing climate change to colonizing space so that humanity's growth is not limited by the resources on just this measly planet Earth. Which means that, when it comes to noblesse oblige, such as it were, we have in fact entered a new frontier. A Gilded Age oligarch who exploited his workers or cheated his customers might build a library or concert hall or train station to burnish his image. Now, the technocrats have framed their contribution as an algorithmically guaranteed utopia that will bring about the salvation of mankind. The concern is not with the general welfare of humans who are alive today (those forlorn Amazon drivers peeing in bottles) but rather with the potential future happiness of trillions of potential future humans, spread joyously throughout the cosmos — the offspring of those wealthy enough to afford a ticket off planet Earth. (Musk has said that he hopes to get the cost of a ticket to Mars below $500,000, though in 2020, it cost $3 billion to send one rover, one tiny helicopter, and zero people to the planet.) Such thinking not only reduces every problem to one that can be solved with technology, but it also casts the growth of the technocrats' businesses as a moral imperative, while implying that those who question their 'genius' are enemies of not just progress but of all humankind. And that, in turn, explains much of what has recently happened in America's particular corner of the cosmos. The hubris of extreme wealth might once have aligned itself with views of American exceptionalism; and, indeed, to the extent that Trump's populism could ever mesh with the libertarian vein of Silicon Valley, it's because of their shared strongman vibe. But as their wealth has grown, the tech right's long-standing opposition to government regulation has shifted — publicly — toward a more extreme, neo-reactionionary, and antidemocratic frame of mind. Why should the 'fittest' men submit themselves to taxes, regulation, DEI accountability? Why shouldn't they be the ones in charge, if not here in America then in their floating island 'network states' or on their interplanetary colonies? And if pesky government interference threatens the development of the miraculous tech that will allow these things to come to pass, why shouldn't the American government be bought, infiltrated, and managed just like a tech startup, with total corporate control and the 'fittest' guys at the top of the roster? 'These guys think they're Superman,' says sociology professor Brooke Harrington. 'This is an extremist ideological movement that sees democracy as outdated, and it's amazing how much they talk about it,' says Gil Duran, a former editor of The Sacramento Bee whose Substack, 'The Nerd Reich,' has painstakingly drawn connections between certain antidemocratic ideas and the would-be kings in tech who seem taken with them. Duran has particularly highlighted tech's embrace of people like Curtis Yarvin, a once-obscure programmer now famous for his assertion that America suffers from 'chronic kinglessness' and that we should 'get over [our] dictator-phobia' and submit to a CEO-in-chief who would govern like a 'joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents' opinions' (Yarvin has floated Andreessen as a possible man for the job). Thiel, who once famously defended his contention that democracy has not been served by granting women the vote, had Yarvin to his home to watch the 2016 election results (Yarvin has said that he's 'coaching Thiel' and that he is 'fully enlightened'). Both Thiel and Andreessen have, through their companies, invested in Yarvin's software startup, Tlon. In a 2021 interview with a right-wing podcast, J.D. Vance name-checked Yarvin and seemed inspired by his proposal for 'rebooting' the government with a program called RAGE (Retire All Government Employees) that many see as a clear preview of Trump and Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The weekend of Trump's inauguration, Yarvin dined with Michael Anton, now a senior member of Trump's State Department. 'It was when Vance got on the ticket,' says Duran, 'that it suddenly escalated to: This shit's going into the White House.' As Harrington sees it, that was the next logical move once the tech elite had enough money to pull it off. 'The broligarchs believe they are entitled to own everything and rule everything,' she says. 'If your goal is to own everything worldwide, if that is actually your ketamine-addled goal, then you need to destroy any institution that has the power to hold you accountable. Buying the U.S. government is a brilliant strategy: 'Fuck democracy. We own it, we bought it, and we're running it the way we want.' ' (Musk has recently denied reports about his frequent ketamine use.) 'P.S.,' Harrington wrote to me shortly after our interview. 'I hope that I'm completely wrong about the broligarchs and their aims. I've never hoped so hard to be wrong.' One sunny day this spring, on the floor of a building so high above Manhattan that helicopters occasionally fly by below us, I meet a man wearing a suit and glasses and an unreadable expression. We sit together at a long table, the man's back to floor-to-ceiling glass and a peerless blue sky. For decades, this man has worked among the right-wing elite. 'If I wrote Peter Thiel right now, he would write me back,' he tells me. 'I met J.D. Vance at Peter's house — the one in the Bay Area, before he moved to L.A.' In measured tones, this man confirms Harrington's fears. He tells me that the tech billionaires he knows are in fact staging a sort of siege on the American government, building what he calls 'a new techno-feudalism in which there's a patchwork quilt of these billionaires who can deliver everything that society needs.' 'The money isn't the goal here, right?' he says. 'Everybody tries to make it about the money. That's not what it's about. It's about socialization and control.… They would like to see an end to democratic liberalism and constitutional republics.… They view laws not as laws, but as conventions meant to be disrupted in an attempt to right the ship.' It's not a conspiracy — 'They don't have the alliances, they're not coordinated,' the man states. But he is adamant that the wealthiest men in the world are often motivated by a certain set of 'core principles': Liberal democracy is weak and ineffectual; the wealthiest tech titans know best; nothing and no one should be allowed to stand in their way. 'Everything to them is a structure to optimize,' the man in the tower tells me. 'The psychology of I-think-I-should-be-in-charge is the original factory setting for anybody who is at that level of wealth. I just think the difference is between people who do it well and people who do it poorly.' Suffice it to say the technocrats are doing it pretty poorly, if one's concern is the plight of the common man alive on Earth, today. But, as it happens, they are also doing it pretty poorly if one's concerns happen to include physics, AI engineering, and the laws of science. 'Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,' says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. 'There are so many reasons why it's such a bad idea, and this is not about, 'Oh, we'll never have the technology to live on Mars.' That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.' Then again, you don't have to do a cursory examination of the facts of Mars if you believe tech is close to inventing a machine that can change the physical properties of the universe. In 2023, billionaire OpenAI CEO Sam Altman conceded that climate change was a huge problem, but brushed off its hugeness with the contention that super intelligent AI would soon be able to tell us how to make a lot of clean-energy facilities, how to amp up carbon capture, and how to do both of those things quickly and at scale. 'What he said was, 'A good way to solve global warming is to build a kind of machine without a clear definition that no one knows how to build, and then ask it for three wishes,' ' Becker says with a sigh. According to some who work in the field of AI, that's more than just wishful thinking. 'I can't believe I even have to talk about these people. That's how ridiculous it is,' says Timnit Gebru, an electrical engineer and founder and executive director of the Distributed AI Research Institute. 'They were like some fringe group that nobody took seriously,' she says of how the tech billionaires who talked up AGI were viewed by those who worked in her field. 'Everybody sort of laughed at them out of the room. But because of the money, the billions of dollars that were going into it, they started slowly taking over. Fast-forward to now, this conversation about superintelligence is basically mainstream.' Yet, Gebru argues, the conversation ignores what AI like ChatGPT really is: Not a form of intelligence — which, in and of itself, is almost impossible to define — but rather a large language model that simply scrapes the (inherently flawed) internet and predicts the most likely sequence of words. We are made to think that AI is 'thinking,' but that's just marketing, and misleading marketing at that. A machine that doesn't really think at all can't teach itself to think better. And it certainly can't figure out how to alter the habitability of Mars. Likewise, though Altman claimed in January that nuclear fusion — potentially an inexhaustible source of energy — was only a few years away, the scientists working to bring it about scoff at that timeline (there's a joke that it's been 30 years away for the past 60 years). Crypto continues to have dubious (legal) utility as compared with other forms of currency, but in 2023, it gobbled up as much energy as the entire continent of Australia. In October, Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, said the solution to the climate crisis was to use more energy: Since we aren't going to meet our climate goals anyway, we should pump energy into AI that might one day evolve to solve the problem for us. ('Yeah, that's a quote that he gave in public without, like, a mask over his face or anything,' says Becker. 'And he still walks around, unashamed.') In his first week in office, Trump invited Altman, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison, and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son to the White House to gleefully announce the building of 20 more AI data centers. 'The broligarchs believe they are entitled to own everything and rule everything,' Harrington says. 'First, you kill the environment in the process of getting to so-called AGI, and then that AGI is going to somehow magically stop forest fires and storms and the wind?' Gebru asks, dumbfounded. 'It doesn't make any sense. There are no specifics of how this could happen.' Meanwhile, in the name of bringing about an imaginary techno-utopia, real damage is being done. Real people lose their jobs to AI or suffer discrimination thanks to the racism, sexism, and classism the technology replicates from its internet scrubs. Real energy is being wasted. Real problems are being brushed aside in favor of ones that have been invented by the men who've tapped themselves to solve them. 'When you're aiming at utopia, it offers the promise of transcendence of all limits and the ability to ignore everything else,' Becker argues. 'If you know what the end goal is, if you know what the future holds, then you don't have to worry about laws. You don't have to worry about morality.' And you certainly don't have to worry about building a library. It's survival of the fittest on a disastrous, interplanetary scale. It's possible that all this nonsense might someday soon get seen for what it is. Trump seems to be tiring of these guys (as I write this, Musk is skulking back to Tesla to presumably try to jump-start its stock after an explosive breakup with the president). And it's possible that enough people could rise up and speak out and push back against the technocratic takeover that strength in numbers would prevail. The Gilded Age ushered in the Progressive Era; it stands to reason that such a shift could happen again. But it's also possible that a threshold could be reached in which the amount of wealth these men possess exceeds the power of any possible guardrails even a collection of nations could devise. In the amount of time it took me to write that sentence, Musk's fortune grew by about $30,000. In the time it took you to read that last one, he gained about $3,000 more. In other words, we may eventually reach a sort of wealth singularity, a point when the wealth of a few grows so exponentially that it basically reaches the point of infinity. It seems safe to assume that that singularity is actually the one that is most near. After my conversation with the man in the glass tower, we rode the elevator together down through the clouds and back to the Earth's surface, where the building's lobby teemed with Earthlings going blithely about their day, tiny computers clutched in their hands. I asked the man if he saw any solution to the predicament we were in. 'I do think that the most radical idea is a radical unplugging, the radical removal of ourselves from all of their platforms. There would be a manifesto: These things, you cannot do.' Somewhere nearby, a phone dinged. The man exhaled deeply. His plan might work, theoretically, but it seemed as likely as living on Mars. Best of Rolling Stone Every Super Bowl Halftime Show, Ranked From Worst to Best The United States of Weed Gaming Levels Up
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James Webb telescope discovers 'a new kind of climate' on Pluto, unlike anything else in our solar system
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have taken a fresh look at the distant edges of our solar system — and found that, once again, Pluto is defying expectations. When NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto in 2015, it shattered the notion that the dwarf planet was a dormant ball of ice, instead revealing it to be rich with icy plains and jagged mountains. But one of the biggest surprises floated above it all: a bluish, multi-layered haze blanketing the world's sky, stretching more than 185 miles (300 kilometers) above the surface — far higher and more intricate than scientists had predicted. Now, nearly a decade later, new data from JWST confirm that Pluto's haze isn't just a visual oddity, it also controls the dwarf planet's climate. "This is unique in the solar system," Tanguy Bertrand, an astronomer at the Paris Observatory in France who led the analysis, told Live Science. "It's a new kind of climate, let's say." The findings, described in a study published June 2 in the journal Nature Astronomy, suggest similar dynamics may be at play on other haze-shrouded worlds in our solar system, and even offer clues about our own planet's early climate. Pluto's high-altitude haze is made of complex organic molecules from sunlight-driven reactions of methane and nitrogen. The idea that this haze could control Pluto's climate was first proposed in 2017. Computer models suggested these particles absorb sunlight during the day and release it back into space as infrared energy at night, cooling the atmosphere much more efficiently than gases alone. This could also explain why Pluto's upper atmosphere is roughly -333 degrees Fahrenheit (-203 degrees Celsius) — 30 degrees cooler than expected. Related: Why is Pluto not considered a planet? For years, however, testing that theory proved difficult. One major challenge was Pluto's large moon, Charon, which orbits the frigid planet so closely that their thermal signals often overlap in telescope data. "Basically, we couldn't know what part of the signal is due to Charon and what part is due to Pluto's haze," Bertrand said. The researchers behind the 2017 study predicted that Pluto's haze would make the world unusually bright in mid-infrared wavelengths — a prediction that, at the time, could only be tested with future instruments. That opportunity arrived in 2022, when JWST's powerful infrared instruments were finally able to separate the two worlds' signals. Sure enough, the faint infrared glow of Pluto's haze matched the predictions. "In planetary science, it's not common to have a hypothesis confirmed so quickly, within just a few years," Xi Zhang, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz who led the 2017 team, said in a statement. "So we feel pretty lucky and very excited." RELATED STORIES —James Webb telescope unveils largest-ever map of the universe, spanning over 13 billion years —42 jaw-dropping James Webb Space Telescope images —Pluto's huge white 'heart' has a surprisingly violent origin, new study suggests These findings also open up the possibility that similar haze-driven climates might exist on other hazy worlds, such as Neptune's moon Triton or Saturn's moon Titan, Bertrand said. Even Earth's distant past might bear a resemblance, the researchers said. Before oxygen transformed our planet's skies, it's possible that Earth was veiled in a haze of organic particles — a blanket that may have helped stabilize temperatures and foster early life. "By studying Pluto's haze and chemistry, we might get new insights into the conditions that made early Earth habitable," Zhang said in the statement.
