This morning I watched what I could see of the eclipsing blue super moon from the east coast of Florida. I had been waiting about 30 years for the three lunar phenomena to coincide. In August of 1980 I had become very interested in astronomy due in large part to a partial lunar eclipse that I had heard was coming up. I was intrigued by eclipses at 7 years of age and wanted an explanation as to why it was to be a partial eclipse and wanted to know if penumbral was just a fancy way of saying “partial”. I lived in a small town and my elementary school had a very decent library with librarians that would help me find out whatever I could but it wasn’t always easy. We didn’t have the most up to date encyclopedias and the astronomy selection in the science section was stocked mostly with glossy picture books about the planets. When I was 11 years old the school let us all go out and “view” the solar eclipse that occurred near the end of the 1983- 84 school year. Of course we made the standard shadow boxes and were taught to never ever look at the sun but I could NOT resist taking peaks as the sun was nearly covered by the shadow of Earth. The world around me took on a weird dimness and I felt the magic of the eclipse and understood why ancient cultures felt that eclipses were so significant. I felt a little privileged to be living in a time in which we knew the cause and the exact timing of the sun going dim but I also felt a little deprived to be living in a world without the belief that the happenings in our sky held signs and omens that shaped human events and rituals.

We had 14 eclipses in the 1980s that kept me interested in the sun and moon and their relationship with Earth. During that time I had begun studying the stars and could point out most of the well known constellations and planets to anyone that would listen to me. In central Florida where I grew up I was far away from big city lights and could clearly see the milky way like diamonds poured out across the dark velvet sky. I think at first people were slightly amused at my enthusiasm and stories about the night sky but after a few years they started to call ME when they had a question. I would get questions about something very bright or very twinkly or streaking overhead and I usually had the answers (Venus, Sirius, the Orionids meteor shower). I had learned all of my information thus far in the age before the “information super highway” or Google and had done so by visiting libraries and reading outdated books at my school. I was never too sure of my pronunciation of astronomical names and phrases because I mostly just read about them and didn’t have anyone teaching me how to say them.

There was another HUGE sky event in 80’s that had people talking and excited. Halley’s Comet came through in 1986 which was the year I turned 13 and boy did it get a lot of build up! I was pretty excited about it and couldn’t believe how lucky I was to be here for the famous comets return. I studied where and when to look and read all about Samuel Langhorne Clemens and his desire to go out with the 1910 passing of the comet because he had been born during it’s appearance in 1835. I had been spouting facts about an ancient Greek comet that had all of the characteristics of Halley’s so it MUST have been the same comet. I was so full of information that I was glad when someone would ask me about it. Apparently a lot of people including adults had the idea that it would be SUPER BRIGHT or that it would streak by like a “shooting star” and I was happy to correct this misinformation. Turns out many people were disappointed that year including myself. One of my uncles said to me “I went outside last night and didn’t see anything flying over but an airplane.” Some nights during Halley’s visit my dad would take us out into a field and let us use his gigantic binoculars to look for the comet on clear dark nights. We were able to see it but it was HARD. The binoculars were powerful and heavy which made it hard to keep them steady enough for a clear view. I tried to slow my breath and the beat of my heart. With patience I was able to get a pretty good look at the smudge of a comet in the night sky and after several nights I was able to make out that distant smudge with my naked eye! I was initially disappointed with my view of the comet and others would make comments about wasting their time or exclaim “THAT is all it is?!” when I pointed it out for them. I was able to regain my own enthusiasm for the event my giving friends and family some facts about what we were looking up at. I would say “yeah, but it is on the opposite side of the sun from us” and when they were still mumbling unimpressed I would say “Hey, it’s 39 MILLION miles away and you can SEE IT!” then someone might say “I can’t actually see it though” and I would say “focus right beside it because sometimes it easier to see when you don’t look right at it” which didn’t go over very well. One time I was trying to impress whoever was out in the dark field with me by saying “there are TWO meteor showers associated with Halley’s Comet!” and I got a couple of “cools” and an “awesome, are they happening tonight!?” I wished I could say yes but replied “uhhhhh no… but if you stay out here for awhile looking up you will see a random shooting star just like every other night.” which was followed by a long pause while we all looked up then “Ohhhhh kaaaay” This was a tough crowd. Some people seemed to be disappointed in ME because I had built the comet up over several months and they felt as if I had tricked them.

Over the years I saw people get all excited about upcoming events only to be let down at the reality so I stopped building things up for people and stopped volunteering information about things that I was interested in. If someone asked me a question I was all to happy to give them all of the information they wanted but I mostly stopped inviting people out to look at meteor showers and planets with me. I did have a few younger cousins and a couple of older cousins that would occasionally watch the night sky with me but it seemed to me that there wasn’t much room for it in the adult world. One thing that everyone still seemed to get excited about though was THE ECLIPSE. I started to think of the eclipse as the easy way to get people into my world of astronomy.

Not long after the passing of Halley’s comet I received a decent Meade telescope for Christmas. Having a telescope was amazing for me and I used it throughout the year spending many hours alone beneath the dome of the sky. My dad spent more time with me and my ‘scope than anyone else did and I will never forget the time we spent taking turns at the eye piece looking at the moon and the planets. I remember the very first thing I looked at through my telescope. My dad was with me and I was trying to follow the directions for using the new tripod to position my new telescope to view Sirius close to the horizon. It was super bright and super twinkly and very colorful. I didn’t want to spend too much time reading the manual so I grabbed the largest lens (which turns out to be the lowest magnification) and popped it into the 90 degree diagonal prism and aimed the end of my ‘scope at the big bright twinkly star figuring that it would be about the easiest thing to find. Almost right away I spotted the BIG bright scintillating light and got super excited. I was bouncing up and down on the inside but being very careful and deliberate on the outside. The image I was seeing was big and fuzzy so I started to dial the focus in….the image got BIGGER but I realized that it was also getting fuzzier so I dialed the knob the other direction. As the image sharpened it got smaller and smaller but still seemed to be twinkling even though it wasn’t as colorful. I was amazed at how alive the star appeared through the lens. I started to feel like an astronomer making a discovery because it seemed like small objects were darting in and out and around the star. I couldn’t believe what I WAS SEEING! I actually gasped aloud. I couldn’t believe it until I realized exactly what I was looking at. The end of my scope had dropped slightly and rather than being aimed at the “dog star” it was aimed and now perfectly focused on a street light about half a mile away that had moths and beetles darting around it and banging into the light. It was a really great close up of the light. I remember the feeling of being dumbfounded and nonplussed and then laughing so hard at the realization that I was looking at something on planet Earth. I let my dad have a look and we both just laughed and laughed. He told me to let that be a lesson to me. I took that to mean that perspective and focus are important and that our ideas can be changed by focus or the lack thereof without even knowing what we’re really looking at.

Me having this telescope sort of got people’s attention again. In the summer of 1989 I was 16 years old and we had a total lunar eclipse. It was a spectacular event because it went on for HOURS and it occurred a few days after the peak of the Perseid meteor shower so we saw several “shooting stars” as well. It was a warm night, we were still out of school for the summer so I had friends and family come over to look through my telescope. People always asked to come look through it whenever there was a meteor shower even though I explained that meteor showers couldn’t be viewed through a telescope. So while we were all out in the field I would let people take turns looking through my telescope. They oohed and ahhed as I aimed and focused on Saturn and it rings, or Jupiter and it’s moons or our own moon and it’s many mare and craters. I had my crowd back. I will never forget that night as long as I live. I was having conversations about eclipses and meteor showers and the comets that caused them and people were actually listening and amazed and excited like I was. I remember specifically telling people that this was one of the best eclipses so far and that I regretted that I wasn’t aware of the one in 1982 that had been an eclipse at PERIGEE that was the second full moon of the month which made it a blue moon. I told them how very rare it was and how there wouldn’t be another blue perigee lunar eclipse until I was FORTY FOUR YEARS OLD!! I couldn’t imagine how the world would be in thirty years. I had no idea where I would be but I knew that I would be watching that eclipse! I had no idea that the term “supermoon” would replace “full moon at perigee” or how I would fight that change at first before grudgingly accepting it and then coming to sorta kinda like it….even though I can’t stop myself from telling people that I had been a moon freak or “lunatic” before it was cool and that the terms supermoon and micromoon were very recent creations even though the moon has been doing those particular tricks forever.

This morning less than a month before my 45th birthday I stood alone on the balcony of a very old mansion along the Indian River as I watched the moon that I had told my crowd about 30 years ago. It was a beautiful rare blue super eclipsing moon. It was worth the wait even though from my vantage point it was setting before it reached totality. I was NOT disappointed. In fact it was better than I had come to
expect it to be for me. I thought clouds would probably block it. In recent years I have lowered my expectations which means simply that I am less disappointed with celestial events as well as terrestrial ones. Everything is amazing and wonderful. Just the fact that a round glob of goop in my face has a lens that allows light in to a bigger glob of goop in my skull which translates into images so that I can see what is happening around me even light years away is mind numbing. More mind numbing even than a street light surrounded by bugs on a cold night in Florida.