A Faint Eclipse on the Mourning Moon

The Full Moon for November is late, arriving tomorrow (the 30th) at 09:30 UTC, because the last Full Moon was on the last day of October. Here in Paradelle, the Moon will be full at 4:30 AM EST appearing opposite the Sun.

But the Moon always appears full for about three days around this time, so from Saturday night through Tuesday morning, it seems to most people that there is a Full Moon.

There will also be a very faint penumbral lunar eclipse. It will be nearly imperceptible, so you probably won’t see anything when you look up at that Full Moon even while it is happening.  I suppose a really careful observer, maybe with a telescope in a dark place, might see a subtle shading on the Moon

This celestial event made me think of the poem by Billy Collins, “As If to Demonstrate an Eclipse” from his collection, Nine Horses.

I pick an orange from a wicker basket
and place it on the table
to represent the sun.
Then down at the other end
a blue and white marble
becomes the earth
and nearby I lay the little moon of an aspirin…

That poem reminds me of  a solar system model that was in a number of my school classrooms where you could move the planets around the Sun which made me, like Collins, feel like “a benevolent god presiding / over a miniature creation myth.”
What you will be able to see in the night sky near the Moon during the eclipse is a reddish star called Aldebaran. That star is the Eye of the Bull in Taurus. The tiny dipper-shaped Pleiades star cluster (which is used in the Subaru emblem) will be nearby.

The November Full Moon has many names. In the past, we have used many of these names, especially those that apply to Paradelle nature signs, such as the Beaver Moon, Fog Moon, Moon of the Falling Leaves, Frost Moon, and Snow Moon.

In some pagan traditions, this is the Mourning Moon. Though many of us reflect on the year and make personal changes in our lives with the new year, this Full Moon can be seen as a time to let go of the past. If there is a bad habit, fears or emotions that are weighing you down, you are supposed to send them off as the moon rises Monday morning. A morning Mourning Moon for 2020 – a year many of us are quite willing to let go.

Everything Is Always Moving

This photo of Aldebaran is cropped from one made of the Hyades star cluster, the nearest cluster to Earth.

Remember back in 2006 when the poor, old planet Pluto was demoted? A group of scientists decided that there are three main categories of objects in our solar system. There are Planets – 8 from Mercury to Neptune. There are Dwarf Planets – now to include Pluto and any other round object that “has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit, and is not a satellite.” And there are Small Solar System Bodies – all other objects orbiting the Sun.

I felt bad for Pluto – and so did a lot of other Earthlings.

In 2015, I read that the waxing gibbous moon outside my window was moving toward the star Aldebaran, the brightest star in the constellation Taurus the Bull. Nothing odd about that. Normal movement.

But what I had not known until then was that Aldebaran also had a kind of demotion. It used to be the North Star, also known as the Pole Star. How does a star lose its rather prominent name and place in the sky?

You probably learned that Polaris is the North Star, but a long time ago Aldebaran had that honor. That was 450,000 years ago.

Back then, it appeared several times brighter in the sky then than it does now. In a way, it shared the title because it was very close to another very bright star, Capella, so they served as a double pole star. (This was 447,891 BCE, if you like precision.)

That’s pretty amazing, but it was a long time ago. What really hit me was that in this little solar system of ours and in our beautiful galaxy and this almost unimaginable universe, everything is always moving.  The sky looked different hundreds of thousands of years ago.

This illustration shows the view as seen from present-day Arizona in 447,000 BCE when Aldebaran and Capella served as double pole stars. Illustration via Carina Software and Instruments and earthsky.org

The identity of the pole star shifts over time. This is due to the 26,000-year cycle of precession. (read more)

Most people believe the stars essentially fixed relative to one another. Within the scale of human lifespans, that is true. But stars are moving through space in orbit around the center of the galaxy.

The Earth is spinning as I sit here typing. It is making our Moon and Aldebaran shift westward but the Moon is moving to the east relative to the “fixed” stars because of the Moon’s orbit around us.

It is all so amazing. Some people think that looking up into that giant night sky makes them feel so small. I disagree. It makes me feel a part of something so enormous and grand.

Hello, Aldebaran. We didn’t forget you.