Natural Learning and the eclipse

I do not have photos (like I did last August) to share from the week's lunar eclipse. It certainly happened at a reasonable hour of the evening so that witnessing it did not require setting an alarm clock. I have a better tripod now, and even a self-timer on my camera.

Instead, my schedule included picking up our daughter from work and then heading over to the church to pick up our sons after youth group. I mentioned how the eclipse had already begun and we could actually see it between the cloud formations passing overhead in the sky. I turned the van toward home and drove for about five minutes when I said aloud, "You know, I bet the sky is clearer east of us. We could just head out of the city limits and get a better view of this thing." Dd loved the idea, so I whipped around, drove back out past our church, then headed east toward the clearer sky! I think our almost 15 yo son just wanted to go home and sleep. He is recovering from a pretty severe ankle sprain that he acquired in football practice last week.

We were gone for almost two hours. We stopped in a few neighborhoods in the next town over, where the neighborhoods are so new there aren't many street lights. Dd tried to take a few photos on her little digital camera, in between the thickening, gathering of clouds that were pouring in overhead. I had not packed mine along, because the weatherman predicted heavy clouds and no good viewing for our part of town. We were actually very blessed to get to see any of it at all. We even got good views of Venus, the star "Regulus" and one other planet or star that were in their clear triangle formation so "close" (from our viewpoint) to the orange moon. It was stunning.

So, it was just us making the memory and chasing after the better view...

While I'm a little sad that I didn't have my wonderful camera and 300 mm lens in the van, I did have some chocolate Hershey's Kisses, and am happy that we celebrated this eclipse this way...together...in our memories forever. I was a lot of fun.

JavaMOM