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COMMENTARY
February 20, 2008
Blood moon
For those of an ominous disposition, there will be a blood red moon tonight. The lunar eclipse will begin about 10 p.m., and continue for an hour, over Ottawa. It will be visible across the night side of the planet: western Europe and Africa, and the Americas. Adjust by time zone elsewhere.If I have any readers on the earth-facing side of the moon, they will see a spectacular solar eclipse, with the earth ringed in colours of sunrise and sunset. For the earth-based, it is such colours reflected back to us that give the moon its tinting tonight, and the astronomers are predicting an especially deep red. I recommend binoculars only to earth-based observers. The moon will be well-placed in the sky, with the bright star, Regulus, and the brighter planet, Saturn, in the frame. Clouds permitting, watch for subtle colour effects: the blues, greens, and purples that sweep the small orb, as the sun’s light is refracted at shifting angles through the changing features at our planet’s edge. Large magnification and time-lapse photography bring these out. It was a lunar eclipse that fatally delayed the departure of the Athenians besieging Syracuse, on the night of Aug. 27th, 413 B.C. Nicias, commanding the fleet, would not sail with such an omen; and yet sail he must, for the Athenian siege had failed. His hesitation allowed the Sicilians to break out and annihilate the Athenian army. This loss left Athens exposed to Sparta, in the next phase of the Peloponnesian War. The historian, Thucydides, gives a fine account of this end to all of Athens’ imperial pretensions -- a moment in which history would change course. A lunar eclipse presaged the defeat of Darius by Alexander the Great in the battle of Gaugamela, 331 B.C., and lunar eclipses foretold the deaths of Carneades (the ancient critic of astrology), of Herod, and of Augustus. It has been speculated (by Isaac Newton, among others) that the eclipse of April 3rd, 33 A.D., coincided with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. There was a lunar eclipse before the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. During his fourth voyage to the New World, Christopher Columbus is said to have survived among the natives of St Anne’s Bay, Jamaica, thanks to the astronomical almanac with which he was able to predict the lunar eclipse of Feb. 29th, 1504. (Note that it would have been a pre-Copernican almanac.) Yet for most of us today, an eclipse is just an eclipse. Among the inhabitants of the earth’s sprawling conurbations, a person not forewarned will be likely to miss one. The night sky is awash with the big city glare, and even out in the countryside, lights in and around every cottage and farmhouse delete much of the celestial drama. One must wander off the roads, very far out of town, to see what the spectacle was to our pre-electrical ancestors. For a moonless sky makes a very dark night in the state of nature. The fear of beasts and bandits was real and practical; and even unmolested travellers would easily lose their way. An eclipse of the full moon (it is always full for an eclipse) darkens the landscape appreciably, yet lets the stars shimmer with an intensity to enthral one’s soul. It would be grand if our modern municipal authorities could be persuaded to cut the lights for the duration of any lunar eclipse, and we could take children out to see it in their own back yards. I made this suggestion once to a couple of Toronto city councillors. They asked what single thing I could propose to change city life for the better. They laughed, for my suggestion was so unthinkable. I thought of their laughter, a few years ago, when Toronto was blacked out, together with much of north-eastern North America, in the late afternoon of Aug. 14th, 2003. The sight of streetcars frozen on their tracks was most poignant. As evening progressed, we saw the stars as we had seldom or never seen them, over the dark glass cubes of our city skylines. It was just past full moon that night. Alas, no eclipse. Let me complete that municipal thought. We live today in urban environments so removed from nature, as to imperil our lives. And that is why I’d add, that if the thought of turning out the lights to watch a lunar eclipse is quite unthinkable, the modern city is doomed. * I've checked the historical anecdotes above against standard reference books, in the usual journalistic rush. But I've been reading a lot of history of science lately, & it has made me more aware than ever that standard reference books, & their even sloppier Internet offshoots, are often wrong, & self-contradictory, carrying as they do various "agenda" legacies, such as the "religion versus science" boilerplate of the Victorian Darwinist propaganda, which required all scientific history to be rewritten as a childish morality play in which "brave, good, truth-loving scientists" battle against "the forces of theological darkness." (I find the Columbus anecdote a bit suspicious in that regard.) I would thus welcome sourced corrections from readers with any genuine expertise. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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