March 12, 2015
4:22 Am: The alarm I set to wake me at a quarter till five hadn’t gone off yet, but I woke anyway. Not surprising. I’d been up several times already, just to look at the time, and put my head back to the pillow, drifting back into sleep. This time I got up, and walked into the spare bedroom. I pulled the shade, looked out, and there it was. The moon shone bright like looking into a florescent bulb, and the earths shadow had just began to cover one corner in darkness.
I stared out the window sleepily, trying to take in the tremendous sight the lunar eclipse presented. I looked away several times for a minute or two before peering back out the window pane, trying to make the slow creeping of the shadow more apparent. Then after a while I made my way back to the bedroom, intending to sleep awhile longer till the eclipse over took more of the moons bright surface. Instead, unable to stay away, my girlfriend, and I laid at the foot of the bed peering lazily out the unshaded window as the moons luminescence was slowly substituted with blank darkness. Just as the moon became a crescent a new vision appeared, and the dark portion began to color like an exhausted hot coal going out. However, this coal wasn’t going out. As the bright white sliver of moon shrunk ,and the coal grew, it came more and more alive! As the white blade of moon blinked out, all the remained was the orange coppery surface of a moon shadowed from the sun and bathed in every sunrise and an sunset the earth could produce!
An amazing thing happens when you pause to think about the immensity of any given event in our lives. Short of befriending Elon Musk and convincing him to fly me to the moon to watch the eclipse in reverse, this would be the closest I could ever personally come in my tiny human life to seeing all the sunsets and all the sunrises of the my world happening at once. A reflection. A mirror of over 7 million square miles suspended in the sky, used to show me a view out of science fiction. But it was real. It Existed. And it was well worth waking at 4:22 in the morning for.
-Michael Speck
Written 10/9/2014
Popularly called blood-moons, there are two lunar eclipses coming in 2015 as the second half of the lunar tetrad that began in 2014. The first will be April 4th, and then again on Sept 28th. Both will be at least partially visible for at least parts of the US. I’ll be releasing a complete run down to make viewing the eclipses easier in the upcoming weeks. So keep an eye out, or subscribe to automatically receive the guide when it is released.
*Photo courtesy of Pixabay
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