Lunar Eclipse
Tuesday evening, I anxiously watched the weather, and rejoiced as the clouds thinned out. I gazed at the moon through my binoculars, and noticed that the thin lacework of clouds, if anything, made the view more dramatic, with a layering that gave Moon a sense of context and proportion. Around 9:30pm, I started to wonder what was going on. By 10:00, a profound sense of betrayal settled in. Somebody, somewhere, somehow, screwed up.The next morning, I met the screwer-upper, and he was me. I reread the email from my friend Doug, the amateur astronomer, and discovered the eclipse was on for Wednesday night. (Rain or shine.)
Last night's weather was painfully clear and bright; perfect conditions. I was struck by the sharpness of the Earth's shadow, and how its curved shape gave me the sense of the spatial relationships of two heavenly bodies too large for us normally to comprehend. The only other time in my life I've had such a sense of vertigo while intuiting the roundness of our world was the time I viewed the tippy-tops of the skyscrappers of Chicago from a vantage point across Lake Michigan in New Buffalo, Michigan. Each time I felt a momentary fear that, if I wasn't careful, I could fall right off this crazy spinning thing.
You know, don't you, that Moon's orbit is gradually increasing?
Drift away, but steal a backwards glance until the Sun grows cold.
Labels: sci-fi
Umie the Umlaut says, "ask your doctor about the Fredösphere!"
1 Comments:
Too cloudy down here in the "mahdee land o' 'thippy," but from what I remember the cool thing about a full lunar eclipse is that it looks fake. You cannot see stars during a full moon, and the moon is very bright so you miss some detail. It looks bright and flat, like a plate. But during a full lunar eclipse, you can see stars (if you are in the country) and more detail on the moon itself. Also, the gradual change in brightness accross the face of the moon makes it look almost 3-D. The thing amounts to a look sort of like a 1950's science fiction movie. Very nice. Pictures don't do it justice and a telescope reduces the 'ffect.
-spk
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