The Heavens Are Telling…
I have been interested in astronomy since I was a boy, but until recently it hasn’t extended beyond armchair interest. I would watch the sky for the phase of the moon and visible planets and knew a few of the more prominent constellations – Orion, the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia – but mostly from home and with the naked eye or maybe binoculars.
Last year, I acquired a small telescope and have been looking at the sky in more depth. I like my sleep, so I don’t always stay up or get up for the “once-in-several-hundred-years” types of planetary configurations. These things can be very interesting to see, but I don’t feel I have to see them all. One thing you learn pretty quickly is that there is always something happening in the sky and even though many of those things won’t repeat for a long time, perhaps in your lifetime, it’s alright to be selective.
Mind you, I have taken the trouble to get up early and/or travel great distances in the last year to see some astronomical events, ranging from interesting and quietly beautiful to absolutely astonishing. It would be exaggerating to call this a spiritual discipline or even a spiritual practice, but I would characterize these events as spiritual experiences. They take you out of your daily concerns over what will probably turn out to be small matters. “A hundred years from now, there won’t be a word about it,” a friend’s mother apparently used to say. Well, a hundred years ago, that light you are seeing from Orion had already been travelling for four- or five-hundred years.
Planetary Alignment
On the “quietly beautiful” end of the spectrum, last fall I got up early and drove out of the city to Birds Hill Park to see a pre-dawn alignment of planets and other celestial objects. The waning crescent moon and Regulus, the brightest star in the constellation Leo, were bracketed by the planets Mercury, Mars, and Venus. There’s a patient, waiting quality of witnessing when you see this kind of alignment. Not much happens. Eventually the dawn comes and the day moves on, but the event feels like one long exhalation, allowing you to set aside the mundane for a while.
Solar Eclipse
On the “absolutely astonishing” end of the scale, I flew to Nebraska to see the total solar eclipse of August 21, 2017. It started out slowly, as eclipses do, the moon moving to cover more and more of the sun. This partial phase of the eclipse was interesting, but no more so than the planetary alignment I saw later in the year.
When the moon snapped smartly into place over the sun, I completely lost my mind. So did everyone else around me, all of us yelling and screaming like someone had punched a hole in the sky. Which was sort of true.
The photo below is not a very good eclipse photo; it gives no real idea of the experience. It does show the contrast between darkness at midday and the brightness of the sun’s corona, the halo of ionized gas around the sun. The corona is way overexposed in the photo, showing no detail at all. The overexposed corona washes out the body of the moon in front of the sun, which was actually completely dark during the total phase of the eclipse. The immediate area in the foreground of the photo is as dark as it would be at twilight, except that the twilight encircles you all around the horizon. The high clouds don’t block the sun, but add a drama reminiscent of a van Gogh painting.
The elements of the photo are all true, but it does not (cannot?) capture the sheer eeriness of the experience. When you are there, the quality of light seems all wrong. We are used to seeing the sun as a reliable light in the sky, rising and setting on a regular schedule. We expect it to be brightest when it is highest in the sky. When, instead, there is a glowing hole in the sky in the middle of the day, the brain has no idea what to do with that information. Screaming seems as good a response as any. Dumbstruck would also be good option.
By the way, the next total solar eclipse to cross North America is on April 8, 2024. Go! Just go!
Lunar Eclipse
In between these two experience on the Awe Scale was a lunar eclipse I saw on the morning of January 31, 2018. This was a much gentler experience than the solar eclipse and a much less high-stakes event. I didn’t have to travel anywhere. Unlike solar eclipses, which are only visible along a very narrow band of about 150 km, lunar eclipses are visible from anywhere on the hemisphere of the earth that faces the eclipse.
The hype factor for this eclipse was that it was a Super Blue Blood Moon. Say what? It was a combination of three not-all-that-rare factors that produced a combination of events that had not occurred since 1866, almost 152 years previously. It didn’t do much, if anything , to change the appearance of the eclipse, but it gave people something to talk about. If that added to the number of people whose interest was piqued and therefore took the trouble to view the eclipse, that’s OK by me.
The first factor was the perigee full moon, or super moon. This is a full moon that occurs when the moon is at perigee, the closest point to the earth in its orbit. It has the effect of making the moon look a bit larger, although without another moon to compare to, it’s difficult to tell. The second factor, the blue moon, is an informal folk name for the second full moon in one month. The previous full moon had been on January 1. The third factor, the blood moon, refers to the red appearance of the moon when in the earth’s shadow during a lunar eclipse. So, a Super Blue Blood Moon.
In my opinion, the really interesting thing about this eclipse was that, where I live, it was in progress at dawn. The moon got closer and closer to the western horizon as the sun began to rise. It was still visible, as it often is around sunrise, but an eclipsed ghost of its usual self. The sky continued to brighten as the moon, still shadowed, slipped below the trees and out of sight.
