Lunar Eclipse

This afternoon I was driving Soy home from Yogurt Land when NPR informed us of the imminent lunar eclipse. On a whim, we turned round and headed up to Griffith Observatory to sneak a peek at this evening's main event in our solar system. There were a few news vans, some amateur (and professional) astronomers with their 'scopes, and a crowd of a hundred or two shivering sky gazers spread out across the lawn. What impresses me most about seeing the full moon through the lens of a telescope is the fact that it resembles what it actually is: an orb of pale rock and dust, pitted with scars and craters, sailing through the vast emptiness of space. It is a reality check, a reminder of the true nature of the grand universe we inhabit. Under normal circumstances, a glance up at a full moon will reveal a bone-white disc, seemingly tacked to the firmament and changing its position every so often. I think it's the lack of detail that defeats us -- when viewed under a 25x telescope one can see clearly the receding perspective of the mountains, ridges, and seas as they near the edge of the sphere.

We watched the shadow of our planet slowly encompass our anemic satellite; we saw the fingernail crescent of sunlight shrink inexorably to nothingness. We stayed through the 52-minute pinkish totality, the time when the Earth is between the moon and the sun -- when it is lit only by the light skimming off our edges, through our atmosphere. As Jim, our telescope operator, so poetically put it, "the moon is lit only by all the sunrises and sunsets taking place on the planet right now". There are some good pictures on the Pharyngula Science Blog.

The undercards tonight were just as cool as the main event: we were witness to an iridium flare, when a beam of sunlight catches a reflection off of an iridium satellite passing overhead a couple hundred miles up in the sky -- it looked like a shooting star that grew brighter than the stars around it over 20 seconds or so and then faded away; and the planet Saturn, which looks just as your mind's eye pictures it, only tinier.