So, Apparently there was a Blue Moon...

I received a message from @papilloncharity giving me a heads up that there will be a very rare occurrence, a Blue Moon even taking place. I am not usually a stargazer, except around a campfire. But sure enough, when we went outside last night, the moon was there, like always, but brighter, bigger, and well more orange-red (and not the misleading "blue").

The funny thing is that with our increased desire to shine a literal light on everything (think street lights at night, outside lights to brighten the visibility of our properties and so on) we are ever increasingly losing touch (sight) of our heavens. Stars all but disappeared...

But this is also linked with the ever-expanding universe theory, the stars are actually moving away from us. Linked with our obsession with lighting everything up, and making things bright, we are losing the bright shiny sky above. As was clear from the images I am presenting here, there was no visible stars in the night except for the moon.

I remember staying in the mountains one year, and when we went outside, the night sky was lit up like millions of candles burning for us. We lived in a secluded home, tucked away in the mountains, far removed from society and its desire to light up. The house was dark, we listened to the animals around us, and we saw the most amazing stars. I am no stargazer, but I am pretty sure we saw the Milky Way - or something close to it.

How sad is it that we turned all of this in for illuminated streets and hallways?

Anyway, I zoomed in as much as I could with my lens (I am sure @papilloncharity's lens would have done a better job!) and took some photographs of this rare event. Apparently, it will only happen again in 2037. I went through a couple of my camera settings to get it right, and it is interesting how the colour changed on my camera screen. Adding too much light (keeping the shutter open for too long) made the moon look white, like the normal moon. Too long, and it would become too red.

And then I cheated a little bit. The last photograph, although a bit grainy, is one that I cropped to make it look bigger! I wanted to get a nice photograph to put the size of the moon into perspective, but we did not have big buildings in front of us so that I could do that. The moon was alone in the night sky and I could not comfort it.