MIAMI - Sky watchers in the eastern United States enjoyed an unusual view of a dark moon rising during a total lunar eclipse yesterday after a week of straining to see the more elusive Comet Hyakutake.

For celestial buffs, the night offered a rich menu.

''It was beautiful from here - a wonderful three-event night,'' said Alan MacRobert, an associate editor of Sky & Telescope magazine in Cambridge, Mass. ''We had an evening total eclipse of the moon, a naked-eye comet on the other side and Venus next to the Pleiades star cluster ... It's rare to get three like this all in one evening.''

The huge, darkened sphere rose on the eastern horizon at twilight.

''Luna! Luna grande!'' three-year-old Andreas Duemichen shouted in Spanish, jumping up and down on a Key Biscayne beach after seeing the gray-orange orb through a telescope.

The full lunar eclipse appears whenever Earth, at the time of a full moon, glides directly between the moon and the sun. The result is an eerie sphere with its color ranging from grayish to copper to red-brown.

That the moon can be seen at all during an eclipse is an optical trick, played by Earth's atmosphere: It is refracted light that skirts around Earth, bent by our atmosphere toward the moon. The eclipses offer one of the few times the moon can be seen clearly as a sphere, rather than a pale disk.

''It's spectacular,'' said Roy Gallant, director of the University of Southern Maine's Southworth Planetarium. ''It's a beautiful orange-red. I've seen a lot of lunar eclipses, but this one is so bright.''

But the lunar eclipse wasn't causing the same buzz as Hyakutake.

''Lunar eclipses occur more often than naked-eye comets that are visible from cities,'' said Geoff Chester of the Albert Einstein Planetarium at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

The last lunar eclipse was in November 1993. The last time the Eastern Seaboard got a dark moon rising was December 1992.

The dark moon rising has long been seen as an ominous sign, and some pregnant women routinely call the Miami Planetarium before a lunar eclipse, fearful it will hurt their unborn.

Lunar eclipses have even altered history.

Christopher Columbus, who knew the eclipse was coming, told natives of Jamaica in 1504 that the Christian God was angry about their lack of cooperation and would darken the moon as a sign. An ''angry, inflamed moon'' soon appeared on the clear horizon and the terrified natives rushed up to the explorers with offerings of food and supplies.

The lunar eclipse, with Earth's curved shadow passing over the moon's face, tipped the ancient Greeks that the world was round, although that recognition was lost to many during the Dark Ages.

''This was ancient proof of the earth's roundness staring us in the face,'' said Jack Horkheimer, executive director of the Miami Planetarium and host of the PBS series ''Jack Horkheimer: Star Hustler.''

The volcanic dust from Mount Pinatubo's 1991 eruption in the Philippines darkened a lunar eclipse several years ago, but that dust has cleared, MacRobert said.

People treated to the best show Wednesday were east of the Mississippi, because the eclipse was wrapping up as the moon rose further to the west.

Meanwhile, the comet Hyakutake - which began appearing late last month as a greenish fuzzball in the night sky - was visible again near the constellation Perseus in the northwestern sky.

Horkheimer said lunar eclipses are one of his favorite phenomenons.

''People think they are not as dramatic'' as comets, he said. ''I like them better. They are the poetry of the heavens.''