We were chatting away the other night, daughter Peg and I, when she came out to have dinner with me. Suddenly she said, “Hey, tonight there’s a blue moon. I read about it in the Times.”
I looked at my watch as it was already almost dark and I said, “Let’s go out in back and see if it’s there.” So we picked up our coffee cups and went out to the patio to scan the eastern sky. First, nothing. Then… “Wait! It’s back there behind those trees.” A leafy rampart of tall trees was guarding the distant horizon and we caught a glimmer of the rising moon peaking through. As we stood there we could actually see the brilliant, impatient, orange globe slowly levitating up, up and up above the barriers and fully revealing itself in glorious enlargement – more perfectly round than we even expected. Ah! The moon hung there like a giant 3D color photograph, thrilling us with its theatrical entrance, all bathed in luminous mist and mystery.
But it wasn’t blue at all. Why, then, was it trumpeted as a blue moon? It took someone of Peg’s generation to react instinctively to find the answer. The world-wide web, of course. Google would tell us. And dependable search engine it is, it did. The “blue moon” appears when it is the second full moon within a single month. We discovered our moon on the last night of the month (July 31, 2004) but the previous full moon had been on the second day of the same month. Another calculation for the phenomenon is when there are thirteen full moons within a single year’s twelve months. The moon’s cycle is 29 days and three full moons within a season of four months are also called “blue moons”.
The rising moon we saw wasn’t blue, but later as it ascended higher in the summer sky it became a shade of light blue. The moon itself, of course, doesn’t change color – not even with all of its green cheese! – but the color we perceive is affected by whatever elements the atmosphere contains that filter or refract the sunlight bounced from the barren moonscape. After a volcanic eruption, it’s red.
Then I realized that a month before this full moon, I had seen from Washington Island in Lake Michigan off the northeastern peninsula of Wisconsin its predecessor apparition. While visiting there with daughter Barbara and son-in-law Eric I expressed interest in their impressive telescope standing on its tripod by the window in their dining room. The night was perfect for setting it up under the stars on their large lawn and have it pointed at the moon. Then, for the first time I was actually able to view the craters on the lunar surface. And yes, that night under the stars, that moon was tinted blue.
How many times have I not heard, played and sung the song with the words: Blue moon, you saw me standing alone, without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own….etc.? Those had always been just poetic words. Now at least I have a new contextual appreciation for lyricists’ inspiration.
Many songs carry moon motifs. There is a magic, a mystery and a lush romantic force projected by this nightly lunar visitor, obediently orbiting our planet. It moves human hearts to react and respond, often with musical, verbal, photographic and pictorial artistry. The theme of love is carried by moonbeams. My voice teacher in college had me memorize the German lieder Der Mond, der ist ihr Buhle (The moon is her lover.)
Our ancestors saw the same moon we still see and, perhaps even more than we, they reacted spiritually with awe and wonder. It gave a form and a substance to humans reaching out for their concept of God or gods or for a sign of the divine that, being seen, was more real and no longer hidden. The moon – and the sun, of course – showed themselves with reassuring regularity and, like the stars, served to generate legends and beliefs. And the lunar cycles even affected moods and psyches. Lunacy and lunatics as words emerged into our vocabulary canons.
I shall not forget the first navigational line of position I captured from the moon during World War II flying over the Pacific Ocean – before the days of sophisticated satellite positioning apparatus, when the sturdy and faithful octant (or sextant) would provide a means to measure the angle above the horizon of the moon or the stars and extrapolate from charts how that could help us find where we were at a given hour, minute and second. We needed one or two additional position lines to “fix” our global location. In its way, that was awesome, too, especially if a plane was off course or lost over the vast ocean.
Those of us who watched “live” on television as the pioneer astronaut Neil Armstrong first stepped on the moon in July of 1968 will always remember the moment. A reported 600 million of us viewers saw and heard him pronounce: One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind!
The moon is late tonight. It lags behind on each orbit. But, just as we wait for tomorrow’s sunrise and know it will arrive on schedule at 5:57 a.m. EDT, so also we are told that tonight at 10:15 p.m. the moon will rise again. I may not see it, however, as there is an overcast beclouding the heavens right now. Yet, most of us have experienced the thrill of witnessing the lunar force pushing its illumination through the fog and the curly curtains of mist hanging over us.
I pretend I am flying again on a night like this, climbing to a cruising altitude and suddenly breaking through the cloud layer. There it is -- in its glorious brilliance giving me a radiant welcome to the heavens, seeming almost to sing out a romantic melody – a chorus of Blue Moon or Harvest Moon or Moon Over Miami, perhaps? Or maybe the Man in the Moon will hum for me the lush French harmonies of Debussy’s Claire de Lune.
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| Page last modified by Richard Lee on 17 August 2004 |
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