Date: July 28, 2011
Title: Tumble Into Darkness
Podcaster: Jeff Wood
Description: In this podcast Jeff Wood describes watching the December 2010 lunar eclipse with his family.
Bio: Jeff Wood lives in Pueblo, Colorado with his wife and daughters. He works for CSU, and gets the occasional short story published.
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Transcript:
Tumble Into Darkness
By Jeff Wood
My name is Jeff Wood. I live in Pueblo, Colorado with my wife and two daughters. We have an ongoing relatonship with the full moon. Back when our girls were small, we’d drive out to the banks of the Arkansas 5 or 6 timjes a year, park, make a game of predicting exactly where on the horizon it would rise. When it was fully risen, we’d go home, eat supper, continue on with our lives.
Now that they’re older, our lives have gtten necessarily busier, more complicated, but we still manage 2 or 3 full moons a year.
I remember vividly the 2009 New Year’s Eve full moon. The hand-off of 2009 to 2010 was accompanied by not just a full mon but a full blue moon, and I love that image as a visual metaphor of year’s end: one orb setting just as another rises, with you at the fulcrum, balanced between them, the past calling from one horizon, the future from another. The sky becomes a mirror of the mind. We watched the moon rise from the bluffs of the Arkansas, as we have so many times before, came home, celebrated the New Year six or so hours later.
December’s 2010’s lunar eclipse didn’t fall on year’s end, but it came the day before solstice, the day before the darkest day, and mirrored my own mental landscape so well it follows me into 2011, as I say these words. My mother died in September of 2010, and that sad event follows me as well. Perhaps the sky is not the mirror. Perhaps I am the mirror.
Skies were cloudy, it was cold out, and I wasn’t expecting much. But clouds began to clear as the eclipse started, just before midnight, so I fired up the clay stove and set up my telescope, a user friendly 8 inch dobsonian. Just before totality I woke the rest of the family up, dragged them out of their beds and outside, hot water ready for tea and hot chocolate.
My eldest daughter lasted about a half an hour, until totality began, then stumbled back to bed, familial obligations fulfilled. My wife fared much better, well into the thing, mavelling at the sight of the darkened surface of the moon as she drank her tea, but she too wandered back inside to bed after an hour or so.
And then it was down to me and my youngest daughter. We snuggled close to the stove, talked a little, went to the telescope a couple times, but mostly just watched as the moon turned eerie red, then dull brown as the moon slid fully into shadow. It was a long, cold wait for light after that, but light, when it came, was dramatic. It was preceded by that same weird red glow, and then, not quite suddenly, the edge of the moon lit up, and light slowly spread across the surface as the red glow faded. Lovely, startling, moving.
After that even youngest gave up the ghost, went to bed. I tucked her in, poured myself several fingers of good bourbon, and went out to watch the end. Things were about half in shadow by then. I sipped my bourbon and smelled the woodsmoke and watched the moon slide into sunlight, surrounded by night, and thought about that tumble into darkness, that long cold time in shadow, and the slow but inevitable progress back into the light.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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