North Americans will have the opportunity to see a stunning lunar eclipse if they are willing to be awake early enough on the morning of Tuesday, April 15.

NASA announced in a press release that this lunar eclipse is a very special opportunity for North America. The Earth's western hemisphere will be facing the moon for the entirety of the eclipse, an event not expected to occur again until 2019.

"Sometimes they'll happen and you'll have to be somewhere else on Earth to see them," Noah Petro, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) deputy project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in the release. "Most [residents] of the continental United States will be able to see the whole thing."

Starting at 2 a.m. EDT, a dark shadow will begin creeping across the moon, giving it the appearance that it is changing phases in minutes. At 3:45 a.m. EDT, the eclipse's peak, the moon will be fully engulfed in the Earth's shadow. Because it will also be aligned with the sun, the moon will reflect red light into the Earth's atmosphere, shining a similar color to that of a sunset.

"It's a projection of all the Earth's sunsets and sunrises onto the moon," he said in the release. "It's a very subtle effect, and if any part of the moon is illuminated in the sun, you can't really see it."

Petro said lunar eclipses are not all that rare, but opportunities like this are since the moon orbits the Earth on a tilt.

"They don't happen all the time, and the sky has to be clear," Petro said. "It really gives you a chance to look at the moon changing."

The LRO spacecraft will orbit the moon twice during the eclipse and is not expected to experience any glitches while doing so. LRO will shut off its instruments and scientists will wait for another eclipse to study what happens to the moon's surface during one.

"For quite a while, people in LRO have been analyzing what's going to happen during this eclipse," Petro said. "We'll make sure the world knows LRO survived with no problems."