musings on eclipses

I only saw part of last night’s eclipse: we had cloud cover that was thin enough to see the bright disk of the full moon, and thus to see as it disappeared, a bit like the regular phases of the moon sped up, but not thin enough to see the spooky red moon.

This morning, I remembered what I think was my last complete lunar eclipse, which also fell on a pagan holiday. That time it was the September equinox, back in 1996. My friend G had an apartment in the Stadium district of Tacoma in a building perched on the edge of the hill, a building that IIRC had previously been some sort of hospital. He had door-size windows that looked out on the Sound & Mount Rainier — an amazing view! (K’s apartment in the same period, in an entirely different building, also had a great view of the mountain. OTOH, my apartment had no view whatsoever.) So we watched the eclipse from his apartment, and it was lovely, one of those great clear September evenings, with the huge reddish moon over Tacoma.

The only solar eclipse I can remember was in 2001 or 2002, sometime in the summer, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a total eclipse. I spent a while on my lunch break at our duplex in Lakewood trying to get a pinhole setup working; I was never entirely sure that I’d really actually seen anything. :\ Alas.