Near-total eclipse

Alerted to tonight’s lunar eclipse, B and I started looking outside around 8:40 pm hoping it wouldn’t be too hazy to see the moon clearly. It came up looking kind of vague, not nearly light enough to register on my camera lens, but after about 10 or 20 minutes the croissant edge got much brighter and I was able to capture the above shot. It looked much better in real life, very 3-D as B said, something like an orange.

As the moon kept rising, more of it became exposed. I gather that the eclipse wasn’t total or if the face of the moon was completely in the Earth’s shadow at some point then it was as the moon was rising and before we first caught a glimpse of it.

As it was the sliver of light on the left side of the moon got larger and larger until we had a gibbous looking near-full moon, as in the second picture (which likewise does not look as sharply detailed or even as luminous as the moon looked in real life).

Today was also recycling day (or tomorrow morning is the pickup rather). We put a lot of stuff out since over the last few weeks we’ve completely cleaned out and overhauled my home office. That’s a story for another day, but the effect is that I can function much more easily here and find a persistent edge of anxiety that has haunted me for years to be tamped down to nearly nil. For the first time in a long while I don’t feel seriously behind on anything or that some nagging issue that I’ve forgotten about is going to suddenly erupt from a paper earthwork and bite me most righteously on the ass.

Some combination of the full moon and the weekly visitations from recycling scavengers lead to a raucous, noisy evening out on our usually sedate pseudo-suburban street. When I noticed someone poking through our glass and metal recyclables, my inner New Yorker came out and I shouted something like, “What are you doing?!” The man turned and saluted me and kept on rummaging till he was satisfied. I don’t own this place and I damn well have no control over what goes on on the curb.

When I was growing up, whenever there was loud noise or some commotion on the street outside our apartment (from the time I was ten until I moved away my family lived on the ground floor – my parents live there still), someone would say, “Must be a full moon tonight.”