It’s funny how some things which, from a certain point of view, are very ordinary but seem special anyway.  Last night, for example, there was a full lunar eclipse.  I stayed up to catch the fullest part of it, and it thoroughly entertained me.  It was quite natural, though.

If you’ve never seen one, I am sorry you missed last night’s.  There won’t be one that good for many years for the North American continent.  The principle is simple enough:  The moon passes by the side of the earth opposite the sun and the Earth’s shadow covers the moon.  When the moon is completely enshrouded, as it was last night, it is red.  Light refracts around the surface of the moon, eluding the shadow, after a fashion, but only the red part of the spectrum manages to do so well enough to get pointed back at earth.  That’s a very crude (and probably not 100% accurate) description, but it is essentially what happens.  The net result is pretty neat to see.

Yes, I know, it’s still a natural phenomena.  It happens a couple of times a year, to one degree or another.  Lunar eclipses only happen when the moon is full which happens once a month or occasionally twice; thus it can happen twelve or thirteen times a year.  Once or, more often, twice out of twelve or thirteen is a pretty high percentage.  Of course, it isn’t always visible from any given part of the world, so that adds some specialness to when it does, but it’s still not terribly uncommon.

On the other hand, one only has to come across a field of flowers once to see how perfectly natural things can be quite stunning to see.  A lunar eclipse isn’t beautiful the way a field of flower is, but it is still something worth looking at.

Okay, I’ll stop mooning over the moon now.  I hope to vacation there someday, and I think an eclipse would be especially interesting from a lunar point of view.  Someday perhaps I will see it.  See you tomorrow.