It’s funny how some things which, from a certain point of view, are very ordinary but seem special anyway.\u00a0 Last night, for example, there was a full lunar eclipse.\u00a0 I stayed up to catch the fullest part of it, and it thoroughly entertained me.\u00a0 It was quite natural, though.<\/p>\n
If you’ve never seen one, I am sorry you missed last night’s.\u00a0 There won’t be one that good for many years for the North American continent.\u00a0 The principle is simple enough:\u00a0 The moon passes by the side of the earth opposite the sun and the Earth’s shadow covers the moon.\u00a0 When the moon is completely enshrouded, as it was last night, it is red.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 That’s a very crude (and probably not 100% accurate) description, but it is essentially what happens.\u00a0 The net result is pretty neat to see.<\/p>\n
Yes, I know, it’s still a natural phenomena.\u00a0 It happens a couple of times a year, to one degree or another.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Once or, more often, twice out of twelve or thirteen is a pretty high percentage.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 A lunar eclipse isn’t beautiful the way a field of flower is, but it is still something worth looking at.<\/p>\n
Okay, I’ll stop mooning over the moon now.\u00a0 I hope to vacation there someday, and I think an eclipse would be especially interesting from a lunar point of view.\u00a0 Someday perhaps I will see it.\u00a0 See you tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s funny how some things which, from a certain point of view, are very ordinary but seem special anyway.\u00a0 Last night, for example, there was a full lunar eclipse.\u00a0 I stayed up to catch the fullest part of it, and it thoroughly entertained me.\u00a0 It was quite natural, though. If you’ve never seen one, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=256"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":257,"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256\/revisions\/257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}