Eyewitness Eclipse

First, this isn't my photo. It was taken in Portland during the eclipse of 2008, but it gives a flavor of what I saw tonight. Because...I saw it!

With all the rain in the forecasts, it didn't seem likely the sky would be clear enough. But at the time the eclipse was supposed to start, there were clouds but the full moon was burning through them. First an edge was obscured—could be a cloud but it didn’t move.

So I bundled up and went outside when the moon was about a quarter obscured. But the moon at the top of the sky wasn’t the first thing I saw—there was a wide breathtaking ring around the moon, very big, touching the belt of Orion, with stars inside and around it, with flits of clouds going by.

As the eclipse proceeded, I could see it through the binoculars as a rounded shadow on the moon—working its way to half, to three quarters. For that period the larger ring faded, and again there was a kind of tight corona of light around the moon—dark fragments of clouds moved as if to go across it but somehow they never obscured it.

But as the moon's light softened and faded, with less than a quarter visible, something unexpected. On a clear night when the moon disappeared, the disk would be barely visible, but also more stars would appear in the darkened sky. Here tonight the opposite happened. When the moon faded, the stars disappeared—just blank, milky-dark sky, cloud cover presumably, without the brightness of the moon to shine through it. Or just a coincidence? In any case, it was eerie. When the moon went out, so did the stars. I watched the last undefined light from the moon fade out, and then everything in the sky was gone. The sky was full of nothing.

I came back in to warm up, and a bit later when I returned, a star was visible, and gradually the moon. There was a reddish scar across it but the luminous outline of the disk was clearly visible. It wasn’t like the eclipse in reverse. The sky cleared more until it was almost completely clear overhead—-and though invisible high clouds dimmed it occasionally, I could watch the full disk. At one point through the binoculars it looked weirdly like a Halloween jack’o lantern—orange cast to the disk and what seemed like those triangular slashes of eyes, but just half the mouth—a half smile. The sense in this phase –maybe because of the color—was that this was a sphere in space, not just that bright disk in the sky.

A few minutes later, serious cloudbank moved in. The eclipse cycle was about over anyway. But the bright moon has not yet returned.