Moonstruck . . . ish

Not that the moon needed me to, but I stayed up until nearly 2 a.m. to keep an eye on it, watch its total eclipse.

At 11:15 p.m., Boise, I stepped out onto my deck and found the sky nearly light as day and a bright white moon directly above my house. Five more times, until 1:45, I went out and saw the sky darken as the moon's bright white changed to an eventual coppery red.

I mean, like the moon turned to blood. Look it up in the scriptures--Joel 2:30-31 and Acts 2:20-21. Perhaps that is why I stayed awake, to see if any other parts of those prophecies might be fulfilled. Or perhaps simply to see it happen. I like that kind of stuff.

Besides, this lunar eclipse was a rare one. It coincided with the winter solstice.

Here's more information about that from NASA, just for you:

This lunar eclipse falls on the date of the northern winter solstice. How rare is that? Total lunar eclipses in northern winter are fairly common. There have been three of them in the past ten years alone. A lunar eclipse smack-dab on the date of the solstice, however, is unusual. Geoff Chester of the US Naval Observatory inspected a list of eclipses going back 2000 years. "Since Year 1, I can only find one previous instance of an eclipse matching the same calendar date as the solstice, and that is 1638 DEC 21," says Chester. "Fortunately we won't have to wait 372 years for the next one...that will be on 2094 DEC 21."

I won't be here for that one. But I saw this one. Ha!