Freezing Eclipse
Brrrrrrr… cold Alaskan winter is cold. It plummeted to -20F, and I realize now that I never checked the engine coolant in the Ford that I brought up from the Lower 48. Popping open the hood revealed the coolant had froze inside the reservoir, and that is NOT a good sign. If its frozen in the reservoir, then its very possible it froze inside the engine and the expanding ice cracked the block. I did a quick prayer to any gods that would listen and started it. Luckily, it seems to be running ok and it isn’t showing any signs of a crack. I’m going to set my alarm for a few hours from now so I can start it and warm up the engine. Then we’ll see how it holds up tomorrow when I get the system flushed…
The rest of the day was spent on off-planet matters. Astra scrubbed their LV0007 launch down at the Pacific Spaceport Complex on Kodiak that I was looking forward to, but the show continues tonight with the lunar eclipse. Another brisk night came as I waited patiently for the lunar eclipse to reach full-blossom after midnight. When it was near, I dashed outside into the damn cold and hastily set up the tripod and camera. Then I took an initial picture to get an idea of the beautiful pictures I’d be walking away with:
Ahh… fuck.
I’m not expecting to snap ultra-high resolution pictures that show hills on lunar plains; I’m a working-class hobbyist that has working-class lenses. But damn, I can do better than that. Luckily I had time to get my settings dialed in since this eclipse is a long one - the last time one lasted this long was 440 years ago. After dialing in my settings I grabbed the camera and ran back inside and huddled behind the glass window for a few more minutes, waiting for the eclipse to come full-hither. There are ice crystals in the air from the humidity freezing, and the Canon is definitely going in a sandwich bag as it re-acclimatizes to room temperature (the last thing any photographer wants is condensation forming inside their camera as it thaws).
As I watched out the window at the frozen forest on the other side I got to spend some time alone with my thoughts. That’s almost always guaranteed to suck, but my mind was still off-planet. How does the temperature on the moon’s surface change during an earth eclipse, when our planet snakes the sun’s light? Without an atmosphere to hold temperatures, and with earth eclipses lasting longer on the moon than on earth due to spatial relativity (the earth is bigger and blocks more light), there is more time for the lunar surface to get cold. I Googled this while the celestial bodies continued to align outside and found that when the eclipse had started, the side of the moon that had been baking in sunlight could have reached 260F, but at the time of peak eclipse then it could be the same or even lower temperature than what I’m experiencing at the cabin here in Alaska, next to my potentially cracked engine block. Fuck, I hope that’s not cracked.
Oh, it’s time.
Ten years ago this would have been a decent picture, and given the rate at which photography technology is advancing, I’m sure we’ll soon have cameras that can capture details like the tracks of the moon rover. And I’m sure I could visit the other cabins and houses on my icy road and there would be a couple that would have pictures like this too. But I still love it, despite its blurriness and grain. Sometimes the best photos aren’t the crispest. Sometimes they’re just memory tokens that remind you that you were in the presence of something great, like I was on this night, standing on one freezing celestial body, looking at another.