Eclipse

The total lunar eclipse last night was awesome! I missed the point where the moon was completely in the deepest part of the Earth's shadow, but it was still way cool.

I was surprised at what the eclipse looked like; I had expected something a bit more like Ragnarok. I looked in my intro astronomy textbook (The Cosmic Perspective, a couple of the authors of which are professors here, which makes MSU even cooler, since it's a great book), and it had a picture of a full lunar eclipse which jived with what I saw. The covered part of the moon was reddish-brown. I get why, if there's light shining on the moon from the sun still, it should be red--just like for sunrise/sunsets, the light is passing through gobs of atmosphere and the higher-energy, bluer light gets sidetracked along the way, while the lower-energy, redder light just plods along and makes it through in the end. What I don't get is why there's light from the sun reaching the moon at all during a total lunar eclipse. I could understand a bit of Earthshine (the moon reflecting light from the Earth, which is why you can still sort of see the circular outline of the moon even when just a little sliver is alight), but I was really expecting Attack of the Spontaneous New Moon (full, partly covered, dark, completely black, dark, partly covered, full). Does the moon see a total solar eclipse at this time, or are the relative sizes of the Earth and the sun such that this won't happen? I ardently request an explanation from those who know why the moon doesn't get completely black during a total lunar eclipse.

I like astronomy with the moon; it's rather easy to find in the sky, unlike stars and planets. When I took a gen. ed. astronomy course as an undergrad, we were assigned a moon observation project, wherein we observed the location and phase of the moon for a whole month. That was really neat, since it was science without contrived scenarios; most labs for science classes are so elaborate that they seem to be implying, "Science only occurs in labs and nowhere else." It was something that the students could think about when they looked at the moon; something useful and pertinent to everyday life, unlike, say, Kirchoff's Laws. How many students are going to go around looking at circuits and saying, "I remember doing a project where I found out that the current into a junction equals the current out of a junction"? We see the moon quite often, whereas we don't see a lot of exposed wiring in our daily home lives (hopefully).