The down side to writing a column is that I’m sitting here in the present writing about the future and by the time you read this, it will be past. According to Albert Einstein, it’s all relative anyway: “People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
So there I was, or am, depending on which corner of the spacetime space continuum you are in, or were in, looking up the details of the Nov. 8 total lunar eclipse.
The November full moon is traditionally called the Beaver moon because the beavers settle into their lodges for the winter months. A total lunar eclipse is called a “blood moon” because the surface of the moon appears red while traveling through the Earth’s shadow. The visible light from the Sun appears red as the wavelengths bend around the Earth’s atmosphere — similar to what happens during a sunrise or sunset.
On a winter’s night, when the ground is blanketed in snow, a full moon lights up the entire view. I wonder if that view will appear red instead of blue during the eclipse? I guess I’ll find out. By the time you read this, you’ll already know — that is, if you were out and about during the lunar eclipse between the hours of 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. on Election Day.
Celestial events are predictable and consistent, unaffected by slow traffic, power outages, opinions, conspiracies, or misinformation. They exist and orbit in a set path on a set schedule.
And yet, human beings always present a predictable urge to assign random meaning to predictable events. Perhaps because we yearn for some means to predict our uncertain futures. Lunar eclipses are believed to be a sign of a shift in course. Two thousand years ago, a man named Cleon rose to power in Athens. He promoted anti-intellectualism, violence, and sowed distrust and division. Aristophanes, no fan of Cleon, wrote of the lunar eclipse, “… the moon deserted her course and the sun at once veiled his beam threatening, no longer to give you light, if Cleon became general.”
On the NASA website there is page dedicated to lunar eclipses of historical interest. NASA includes the disclaimer, “inclusion of an historical event … does not imply validation of the historical event nor its connection with an eclipse. The eclipse maps and calculations are simply presented so that they may be compared with references in the literature.” As such, it is still an interesting read to find references to lunar eclipses in historical texts.
I am reminded of the time a woman asked my brother-in-law what he did for a living. When he responded, “astronomy,” she emphatically claimed she did not believe in astronomy. It is a challenge indeed to not believe in gravity. I don’t know how she kept herself grounded.
At any rate, this total lunar eclipse of a full moon on snow covered landscape may finally answer the age-old question: What is black and white and red all over?
