NIGHT OF THE SUPERMOON

The full moon has been ever so clear in our skies for the last couple of months and I only recently discovered that this was due to it being at its closest approach on its 19 year cyclical cosmic dance routine, which quite a lot of people think explains the stresses and strains being put on our planet’s flimsy crust by that oh-so-weak-yet-surprisingly strong force we call gravity.

However, there’s more to gravity than simply dropping a few apples on some learned heads, you know, and no less a figure than Prof Brian Cox weighed into the debate (although his actual weight does seem to be admittedly slight) by posting a link to the “Bad Astronomy” website which basically dismissed much of these notions as so much flim-flam and announcing via his TwitWorld account that anyone who believes such nonsense was a “Nobber” which obviously took the realms of academic scientific discourse to new levels.

Now, I like old “Coxy” as he’s not really known in our house, and he obviously knows his stuff and brings a very boyish enthusiasm to it, but once or twice recently I’ve rather wished he’s just shut up when engaging with the media world and just get on with doing the clever stuff. For example, the clever thing to do when the whole (minor) controversy about the “music being too loud” on his documentary series kicked off was to stay the heck away from it, let the various factions have their spat and carry on doing what he does regardless.

Granted, he was, of course, rightly just backing up his production team by telling anyone who wanted to listen (if they could actually hear it) that he thought personally that it sounded fine, but there was just the faintest whiff of still wanting to appear to be trendy and be “down with da kidz” about it. I always think that whoever you are you should always save your energy for fights that are really important or are the ones that most matter to you like support for research or providing proper funding for scientific education, rather than wading into debates obviously stirred up my a hungry media on a slow news day.

Coincidentally, the “music on TV” debate has been a slight issue to my aging (and unlikely to ever be “down with da kidz”) ears for quite a while now, already and I do find on my ancient and clapped out television that during certain dramas, the music mix tends to mean that I can’t hear the words the actors are saying, which is obviously frustrating to someone as obsessed with words as an unsuccessful playwright like me is, although (and this is where it starts to get really weird) if you watch the programme from the digital recorder instead, or buy the DVD, the sound balance sounds spot on and every word is as clear as a bell.

Maybe the engineers who sort these things out can’t imagine that such venerable, coal-fired receiving equipment could possibly still be out here to descramble their finely balanced symphonic tuning, but it is. Last year I did start to get into the habit of switching on the subtitles when watching something “live” on transmission (as it were…) or rewinding back the live feed to listen again and catch all those pithy one-liners that sometimes end a scene or an episode and, if you miss them, can leave you saying “what did she say?” for literally moments afterwards. Ah the joys of DVR…

Not quite "Super" yet (March 18th 2011)

Meanwhile, of course, I got more than a tad excited at the prospect of seeing what seemed to have been dubbed the “supermoon” for myself, and, as usual, my enthusiasms carried me away with them, and I grabbed the camera intending (with my usual lack of intricate knowledge of the subtlety of all the impressive array of settings) to get some rather nice shots of our nearest neighbour in space as it sped by.

So, on Friday evening as the sun started to sink in the west, I went outside snappity-snapping away (with little actual success) at the glorious white nearly-globe that hung in the beautifully clear twilight skies above me before racing off to do my usual run in the car to the station where I snapped off another few shots having also stopped along the way at a couple of good vantage points to take some others.

If you drive around parts of the USA, you will occasionally come across lay-bys marked up as being “vista points” which are designed quite specifically for passing motorists to photograph some of the parts of the landscape considered to be most spectacular. Whether or not this means that every tourist ends up with photographs that are fundamentally the same is of course debatable, and I don’t want to turn this into a discussion on how very ordered and controlling the so-called “land of the free” can sometimes appear to be although its constant “It is against Federal Law…” catchphrase does seem to be everywhere nowadays. Nevertheless, there are very few such things on the mean streets of Lesser Blogfordshire however, and so I suspected that one or two of my fellow motorists (and maybe the odd pedestrian…) wondered what the heck was going on as I pulled over to the side of the road, and sitting in a car park waiting for a train that is inevitably running late and then taking pictures out of the car window does make you wonder whether anyone’s going to mistake you for a Private Eye and slug you with a blackjack, despite the fact that I was wearing neither a snap-brimmed fedora nor a trenchcoat. Later on in the evening, after I got safely home unmolested by hoods, I was able to take some more shots of the moon in its nearly full state, and, over the course of Saturday it turned out that I hadn’t been alone in this, the general consensus being that Friday was the better night to have done it as Saturday night was lining up to be a cloudy one.

Pre-"Supermoon" sunset (March 19th 2011)

Saturday, the night of the full moon itself did indeed turn out to be more than a little cloudy here in Lesser Blogfordshire but this didn’t stop me pacing around as the sun started to set, wondering what sort of views we might actually end up getting and constantly reminding myself that the whole event was actually happening so that I didn’t do my usual thing of just forgetting all about it and then having to face up to the possibility of living with 19 years of regret. Then I made the snap suggestion that the beloved and I should take a little walk up the lane to a higher viewpoint and await the moonrise, and that is indeed what we did, and a quarter of an hour later we were sitting on a bench, overlooking a large chunk of this fair county of ours as the sun slipped down over the western horizon.

Sadly it became increasingly dark as the clouds rolled in and, as it was a dark country lane, and we’d not dressed for long exposure to the chill, and it really didn’t look as if we were going to get to see the moon at all, we reluctantly headed back down and homewards for an evening in with a curry and a DVD. There had, at least, been a rather spectacular sunset to compensate for our failure, and we strolled home fairly happily after having spent a pleasant enough hour in a beautiful spot, something that we really don’t do enough of.

"Supermoon"
(March 19th 2011)

Still feeling twitchy, as the curry was heating happily away in the oven, I poked my nose outside the front door and looked eastwards to see, just above the trees and glowing through the clouds, the most beautiful moonrise I could imagine, a phenomenon that somehow my own limited camera skills failed to do justice to. Over the course of the next hour or so, I kept on popping outside just to look at it and snap away feebly trying to get a better shot of it to no avail. I did frighten one of the neighbours by saying “hello”, however when they failed to see me standing in my doorway as they strolled by, but luckily they were happy enough to discuss the spectacular moon and its predecessor the phenomenal sunset they’d seen when walking their dog earlier on, instead (I hope) of filing me away in their personal “nutter” file.

As I’ve already mentioned, it will be another nineteen years until the moon is as close again, and by that stage, if I manage to get there at all, I will be probably still be working away as I will have reached the current retirement age, and therefore some years away from actual retirement, and by then, even the Prof may have to admit to having the odd grey hair. Whether or not I ever get another chance to view a “supermoon” remains to be seen, so perhaps that was it, my only proper chance.

Somehow, I now wish the pictures had turned out a little better.