A Report on the Lunar Eclipse

Drawing of the Worm Blood Moon, observed March 14, 2025. The following text was part of a long Substack post published on March 18, which included the report, 8 Haiku, and two short fiction pieces. I included a link to the full post at the end since it has been my most popular post thus far.

A Report on the Lunar Eclipse

I set my alarm for 1:00 Friday morning but woke shortly after midnight. I went outside to check the sky, thinking I would find it cloudy, and go back to sleep. That is my history of trying to see lunar eclipses, but this year was different. For the first time in my 72 years, a clear night conspired with my interest in the eclipse and I stayed up to watch.

It was March 14, 2025, the Full Worm Moon according to the Old Farmers Almanac. The expected lunar eclipse also made it a Blood Moon, a time when the full moon enters the Earth’s shadow and turns a dark red.

The night sky was slightly hazy, so the full moon had a halo. It wasn’t a circle atop the moon, like the halos in cartoons, but an aura of light like the one that surrounds a saint’s face in medieval paintings.

As I watched the moon, a few clouds passed close by. There was enough mist that I could not see any features on the surface, even with binoculars, but the disc illuminated the landscape so that the house cast a shadow on the backyard.

My yard is narrow, and a retaining wall holds it in place. The moon illuminated the wall and a small strip of grass. These features darkened as the eclipse progressed.

It began around 1:00, EDT, with a slight bite taken out of the lunar disc. The pace of the action was agonizingly slow, with the darkened portion growing to half of the moon by 1:45. Around 2:20, I could see an outline of the moon, with a white spot on top, looking like a polar ice cap.

By 2:30, the landscape was as dark as one under the New Moon. The moon had a dark red cast, not the blood red I expected. It seemed as though I had a close view of a distant planet.

I thought it might make a great shot in a science fiction movie. It might be an image for a book cover. I felt I might write that book, or produce that movie. A day later, I realized that it had probably already been done.

As the clock approached 3:00, I decided the moon would return to its normal appearance without my supervision and went back to sleep.

Here is a link to the original post if you want to read it. It received more views that any of my other posts so far.