What lunar eclipse?

Over twenty years ago, my friend Bruce acquired a telescope and we excitedly trooped out, into the darkness, to unravel the mysteries of the universe. "Why is the moon so small," I asked, surprised. Yup...you guessed it. "Try looking in this end of the telescope, Amy," Bruce gently advised.

I want to love and appreciate nature. I really do. But I am SO bad at it. Brad and Sydney were gone during the latest period of the Pleiades meteor shower but I gamely interrupted my marathon-watching of "The Big Bang Theory" re-runs to try to spot at least one of the purportedly 200 meteors-per-hour. The result of that little sky-watching enterprise was a kink in my neck and the realization that there are a LOT of airplanes filling my night sky.

Despite my many failures, I refuse to give up. "What are you doing," Brad asked as I dragged lawn chairs into our backyard at 10 o'clock at night. "A penumbral lunar eclipse occurs in twenty minutes," I told him. "What does penumbral mean," he inquired, resigned to his inevitable fate of staring at the sky rather than watching the Royals play. At 10:20, we stared, unblinkingly at the moon.

At 10:25, Brad switched over to staring, unblinkingly, at his cellphone. "Penumbral is when the moon moves into the outer part of the Earth's shadow," he reported before sighing. "What?" I asked him, refusing to wrench my eyes away from what was sure to be a spectacularly celestial sight. "Well, according to this," he said, "a penumbral lunar eclipse is often mistaken for a normal full moon." WHAT?!? "Also," Brad added helpfully, "the penumbral eclipse started at 8:20, not 10:20."

I stopped looking at the moon and instead looked at my husband, bathed in the celestial glow of his phone. "Oh," he murmured, his thumb flipping from one helpful site to another, "this one says that the eclipse isn't even visible from Earth." "Then WHY even talk about it in the first place," I stormed, gathering up the lawn chairs. "This particular full moon is called the Green Corn Moon or the Sturgeon Moon,"  Brad shared as I stomped back into the house. "I don't care if it's called the Buffoon Moon," I yelled before settling in to watch Kansas City beat Detroit. I want to love and appreciate nature. I really do. But the universe is against me.

credit:  http://joyreactor.com/tag/eclipse