Sunday, September 27, 2015

Crescendo

I saw the "blood moon" from my roof, but it didn't look like this. (I'm still without a new camera, though I doubt many cameras could capture so faint a light). The supermoon's color was not red but a light ochre, the color of dried blood. But still, very exciting that a cloudy day opened its sky for a bit. What struck me as the coolest moment came a bit before the full-on red/brown disk, but nobody seems to have posted a picture of it. (Our clouds closed before I could see its coda.) The last bit of the moon to be hit by sunlight, the lower right, was still so bright that the red light curving around the earth wasn't visible... except as a reddish crescent, open on the upper left. Reminiscent, I suppose, of many a sci-fi book cover of a different phenomenon - a light breaking from behind a celestial object - it conveyed enough depth to let me feel the so rare alignment of sun, earth and moon this way.