Hey, did you see that super blood wolf moon on Jan. 20? Was that cool or what? It was so cool it almost made me howl, or bay, or something.
I’m serious. I’ve watched lunar eclipses before. I’ve tried to do all the right things to “see” a solar eclipse. I’ve gone way out into the countryside to wait until 3 a.m. for a meteor shower. But this was one of the two most interesting, most delightful astronomical events I’ve ever seen, ranking right up there with when I watched comet Hale-Bopp seeming to trail me in my rearview mirror almost all the way from Little Rock to New Orleans one night in 1997.
First, the moon was unusually large, because it was unusually close to the Earth. Then it developed an aura — or, rather, two auras. One, on a bright, clear night, was a large and almost perfectly circular area of soft brightness about four times as large as the moon itself, surrounding it on all sides. The second was a much brighter, less regular area of extreme luminescence that seemed to pulsate around the very edge of the moon. It had a blueish glow, and to the naked eye, it made the moon like it was somehow trying to expand and shift its shape.
That went on for nearly a half-hour before the Earth’s shadow actually began obscuring part of the moon’s disc. As the shadow covered more and more of it, the covered-up part didn’t go completely dark; instead, it went almost dark, but with a faint outline still visible and a reddish tint inside.
By the time, nearly three hours after the eclipse officially began, that the entire moon was enveloped in the Earth’s shadow, the familiar bright, white, flat disc looked like an actual three-dimensional, extremely dullish-red orb, much, much closer to viewers than I’d ever seen it, hanging in the night sky like one of those science-fair models using ping-pong balls to show the solar system.
Maybe you had to see if for yourself. I almost found myself wishing I hadn’t tried to read up on it in advance, because if I had not known what was going on, scientifically, I might have found the whole viewing experience even more thrilling — even spooky.
The world is full of wonders. Sometimes we modern humans ought to ditch the science and look at things, as Neanderthals once surely did, and be amazed and awed.
