Hodgepodge 17/365 - Full Moon

Thanks to thick overcast (some might call it fog), we missed the supermoon two nights ago: the largest and brightest full moon the Earth has seen in 68 years. Or as I like to put it, the biggest full moon in my lifetime. Here's a stunning shot a friend, Bob Fugate, took on Sunday of the moon rising over Sandia Crest in Albuquerque:

Those are radio and microwave towers in silhouette. As he explains of the technical aspects of this shot, "I was nearly 7 miles from the towers and used a 600mm f/8 lens manually focused on the towers once lit by the moon (you have to work quickly since the moon rises fast at this magnification). The depth of field for that set up is from less than a mile to infinity (essentially the moon) so both the towers and moon are in focus. Still looking through a lot of atmosphere so turbulence limits the ultimate resolution." Yes, he did use a tripod.

Here's another beautiful shot from the other night, taken in the Lamar Valley of Yellowstone National Park, accompanied by a chorus of coyotes (close your eyes and imagine):

I was glad to see a few images of this beautiful moon at least. It may not be as close next month, but perhaps a clear sky will afford me a view of it. I reckon if I live twenty more years, I'll get 248 more of 'em (visible or not). A lucky thirty years, and 376 or so. The full moons are finite—for all of us, anyway. I will try to keep my eye out. (Another supermoon rivaling this one will come along in 2034. I'll try to still be here. Maybe I'll actually see that one.) Or . . .

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Over the years—at least in past years—David and I sometimes threw a Blue Moon Party: as in, once in a blue moon! 

I always think of a blue moon as the second full moon in a calendar month, but it also refers to the third moon in a (three-month) season that has four moons: so, the thirteenth moon in an agricultural year, and the one that comes "too early" for its season (hence the third rather than the fourth). Why "blue"? It comes from belewe, Old English for "to betray." The "betrayal" being that the moon wasn't properly timely.

This also ties in with setting the date of Easter—a lunar holiday—and something to do with Lenten fasting (the "betrayal" here being people had to fast a month longer than usual), but that's getting too arcane for me, so we'll leave it at that.

Blue moons, in short, are not straightforward. Unless you think of them simply as "something unusual." Whichever definition you use, they come every 2.7-ish years.

Our blue moon parties were generally pretty informal (we're not big party throwers)—just a bunch of friends and too much food (because we're not big party throwers, we over-
compensated). Once, though, we invited people to come with something creative to share: a song, a memorized poem, a painting. A couple of friends brought a book they'd just published, underwater photography. And David, who had recently seen a major piano composition performed, took the occasion to paint in the second eye on his Daruma doll, which had been patiently waiting for this goal to be achieved.

At that party, I recited the opening paragraph of Cannery Row, certainly one of the greatest passages in American literature:

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitant are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holymen” and he would have meant the same thing.