Blood Moon

JB could not help himself. Somewhere around 4:00 this morning he woke me up to come outside and look at the Blood Moon lunar eclipse. I have to admit, I could have put up a fight, and rolled over and gone back to sleep, but there is something so poetic and magical and compelling about the phenomena of nature, that I did, in fact, foggily find some shoes and clothes to throw on and make my way to our backyard. There JB was sitting on a chair behind his tripodded camera. “It’s amazing. Do you see the red?” I wasn’t sure if it were just my eyes that were heavy-lidded or if the red really was there.

It was still outside. Cool but not chilly. And there was the full moon with the first bite of its eclipse appearing at the left. I was thrown back to more primitive times wondering how our ancestors responded to this lunar disappearance. Then my endurance abandoned me and I weakened to the call of sleep. I went back upstairs to the still warm sheets, knowing that JB would be out in the yard documenting the whole process of the earth’s shadow passing over the moon.

This is called a Blood Moon because of the way the sunlight scatters in our atmosphere. The light reflected off the lunar surface passes through Earth’s atmosphere, where all the  colors of the spectrum, but the reds, are stripped away.

Once I crawled back into bed, I wasn’t sure if I had actually been outside or not, whether the Blood Moon was a lucid dream or an actual observation. I remembered thinking that I would know in the morning if JB had the photographic evidence.

(Photo by JB)