Last Saturday I felt like Linus in “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” as I waited for the rising of the “Super Moon” over the hills southeast of Hollister.
Linus was waiting for the Great Pumpkin himself and was disappointed when he (it?) didn’t appear. I, on the other hand, felt pretty confident that the moon would rise because astronomers can calculate the timing of those things.
The biggest and brightest moon of the year didn’t disappoint, rising on cue from behind the hills, peeking out first as a crescent before ascending to light the night sky like a giant floodlight.
My family and I left my 5-year-old niece’s birthday party in order to see the moonrise. We even took a detour off Fairview Road hoping that we’d get an up-close look at the celestial body’s debut in the night sky.
It hadn’t yet risen, so we made our way home and then went out to the best spot we could find with an unobstructed view of the southern sky.
When the moon began to inch into the sky, our sons commented that it wasn’t as super as they had hoped it would be. I told them it was 15,000 miles closer to Earth than normal, but they apparently had hoped it would fill the whole sky.
It was impressive, not super. “Impressive Moon” doesn’t have the same cache as Super Moon, however.
The really super aspect of the moon that night was its brightness. On a walk around our neighborhood after the moon’s rising, a number of people were in their front yards, marveling at the bright disc whose light washed away much of the starlight that normally dots the sky.
One nice woman told us to hurry over to her front yard so we could see the moon rising above the roof of the house across the street.
As the night wore on, that brightness bathed our part of the world in a light that was out of the ordinary. Around midnight, I stepped into the backyard just to marvel at the moonlight.
I thought about howling, but my wife would not have appreciated being jarred awake by my primal screaming – even though I could have played it off as homage to the “Twilight” saga. She would have countered that my pale skin makes me more closely resemble the vampires in those movies, so that wouldn’t have worked. Or she would have sprayed me with sunscreen and joked that I should watch out for moonburn.
Last year’s Super Moon was a couple hundred miles closer to Earth than this year’s, and next year’s will be a little farther away.
Photos of the Super Moon were all over the media last weekend. It served as a stunning backdrop to buildings and trees and statues. I got artistic by photographing my 17-year-old with his mouth open, appearing to gobble up the moon as if he were Pac Man. Not so stunning, a bit predictable, but good enough for a Facebook posting.
The magic of the moon in May continues on the 20th when a partial solar eclipse will occur, followed the next night by Venus appearing just north of earth’s natural satellite.
Adam Breen teaches newspaper and yearbook classes at San Benito High School and is a reporter for The Pinnacle. He is former editor of the Free Lance. Email him at ab****@pi**********.com and follow him on Twitter @AdamPBreen.
