The moon lights our shared path
What did you do after midnight Monday?
Most of us who are chained to the old 8-to-5 probably slept. But
the first hours of Tuesday morning featured an event that’s
spectacular, even if it’s not particularly rare.
It was a total lunar eclipse.
The moon lights our shared path
What did you do after midnight Monday?
Most of us who are chained to the old 8-to-5 probably slept. But the first hours of Tuesday morning featured an event that’s spectacular, even if it’s not particularly rare.
It was a total lunar eclipse.
While the shadow of the earth completely obscured the full moon at around 3 a.m., I did not make it to the driveway until just before 5, when a crescent of darkness still painted a dramatic picture in the sparkling night sky.
I had trouble returning to sleep, thinking about our planet’s own satellite and its role in our lives.
Every school kid knows the moon influences our tides. It also probably affects our emotions, when we think of moonlight strolls or of the once-politically correct term “lunatic.”
Anyone around my age grew up during the time when President John Kennedy articulated a bold vision that humankind would walk on the moon. And sure enough, we did.
It was the event of a generation, one that all of us surely remember. After the 1969 first landing, our family visited the Academy of Sciences in San Francisco to gaze at a moon rock (not a show-stopper). Classmates set their eyes on careers as astronauts.
It was a time when science fiction became non-fiction. With the application of enough genius and enough money, anything was possible.
The moon is close, by interplanetary standards. It is our very own rock, lit by our very own sun. It waxes and wanes with predictable certainty, cycling every four weeks.
It is quietly beautiful.
It’s the intimacy of our connection with the moon that is its attraction for me.
In much of San Benito County, thanks to our scattered population and enlightened legislation encouraging dark skies, we have a rare view of the night sky.
The stars spangling the blue bowl are hard to fathom. Climb out of the car near Pinnacles or in Panoche Valley on a clear night and a swath of light cuts through the sky – the Milky Way Galaxy. It’s nothing more than a collection of countless stars, part of the pinwheel formation that contains our own sun. Even looking at the sky with a simple pair of binoculars reveals more stars than could be imagined springing from that band of light.
What’s hardest to grasp, for me, is the vastness of it all. Many of the stars we see are distant, so even though light moves at 186,000 miles per second, the image we might behold tonight was produced before Columbus blundered into the Americas.
The thought of looking at 500-year-old images, images of stars that may have supernovaed and been snuffed out a generation or more before my birth, is nearly impossible for me to understand.
But the moon is intellectually attainable. Humankind commuted there over and over again. On night rambles, it illuminates our path.
With this week’s eclipse, the moon’s marriage to our home planet was demonstrated again. We cast our shadow across its surface.
Just seeing that affirmation of our own presence in this inconceivably vast universe is worth some lost sleep.
