I will spare you all the scientific details of the eclipse of this Supermoon. I’d heard it would be out there tonight and the sky happened to be clear, so I took my camera which is capable of better shots than I can  take with it, and I walked down the road to look for the moon.

On the way, I couldn’t resist taking a picture of the bay below me.

It wasn’t completely dark yet so I continued on to the top of the roughly 200 stairs that lead down to the beach. A couple of ladies with flashlights were going down the stairs ahead of me so I felt brave even as it was getting darker. By the time I got down to the next level, probably 100 feet down the hill, it was getting very dusky and I could see a lot of people setting up camp to celebrate the event on the spit of the beach that you see in the photo above. I stopped to take the photo below, but all I could get was a blurry hint of a moon covered with webby darkness.

I realized that these horrible snaps were not worth my having gone down these many steep stairs halfway down to the beach, and worse yet, I would now have to go back up the stairs, with lots of bushes on either side, in nearly complete darkness because, of course, there was no moon to guide my way. Thoughts of lurking bears and cougars “eclipsed” my thoughts of the eclipse.

 

When I got home, there was the moon, now higher in the sky, taunting me to try my amateur photography again.  I had little success.

Much later, in January of 2016, while visiting in Olympia, Washington, a friend showed me a photo she took of this same eclipse while she was in Niagara Falls. With her permission I’m posting her fabulous photo.

I hear that the next Supermoon eclipse is in 2033. I may still be around for it, but I’m not sure I will still be able to manage to clamber up those stairs by that time. Maybe Juanita will come through for me again at that time.