Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Time passes slowly when you're watching a full lunar eclipse

WOW. There are just no words that better describe this morning's lunar eclipse. But of course, I'll go on anyway. A reddish ball floating low in the Western sky. Majestic. Warm. Aglow. It doesn't so much look like our moon. It looks like a planet. It could be Venus or Mars. It's a big, big ball of the same stuff that earth is made of, floating in space, but not very far away. Not far away at all. I started watching it at 4:30 Austin time. It was a totally clear night. I have a balcony door off the bedroom facing West. I watched it for about 45 minutes. What amazed me was that when I came back to see it again about half an hour later, it was even better. It was lower, redder, and more distinctly spherical. My best view of it was at 6:15 this morning, in a clearing amongst the junipers behind my deck. As it got lower on the horizon, the three-dimensional aspect became intense. Our moon is not a flat disk. It is a softly glowing ball in the night sky. What a treat.

And it's too low now for me to see it anymore. It is obscured by some kind of misty cloudy thing just above the level of the hills to the West. Ah, life.

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