Tag Archives: full lunar eclipse

Moon’s Eclipse. May 26, 2021

I woke up very early this morning after only 4 hours of sleep. I collected the day’s prompts–those that had been posted this early–and decided to check my Facebook. Thankfully, someone had posted a notice that the moon was in almost total eclipse. Thus began a hour’s flurry of activity, first trying to photograph it with my hand-held iPhone, then searching the house for my long-neglected Canon with 80X Zoom, only to find all of the SD cards were full or nonfunctional for one reason or another. I erased one, then went in search of my tripod and spent another 15 valuable minutes trying to get the horizontal pivot to work.. No success. Finally, I took it out to the terrace again only to find that I didn’t need to pivot it to get a shot of the moon, but at that exact moment, the sky started to lighten from pitch black to a pale gray and the moon vanished entirely! Luckily, I earlier managed to capture one sliver of moon on my iPhone, and here it is–the blood moon almost totally drained.

On the Night of the Blood Moon

Click on the first photo to enlarge all.

I just couldn’t stop taking photos of the moon on this night of a full lunar eclipse. These may not be the best shots, but I was out there for two hours and I’m soooo sleepy. Strangely, this poem I posted earlier this year to one of Mark’s prompts popped up with the photos in my media file when I posted them. Don’t know how its link got recorded as a jpeg nor how it got here, but it seems to want to be posted again, so here it is:

Lucid Moon

With half a life lived in the dark,
an owl’s hoot, an answering bark,
the moon across the water scattered,
ragged clouds, wispy and battered––

I float in night and solitude,
the night determining my mood.
I lie in darkness and I brood,
a nightly lucid interlude.

When sunlight comes in fits and starts,
The day brings out my other parts.
They rise in me from dawn to noon,
dispelling powers of the moon.

Thus balanced between dark and light,
each half consumes its daily bite.
I welcome each within its time
Life varied, balanced and sublime.

Matt’s prompt today was “Lucidity.”  The common meaning of “Lucid” is “clearly expressed” or “easy to understand,” but another meaning is “bright or luminous.”