We let the kids stay up last night to watch the lunar eclipse. Luckily, the sky was completely clear and the moon was completely above the trees of our neighborhood. In fact, we could see the eclipse through our front storm door. I was happy enough to stay inside and watch, but the Wife and the Girls braved the cold, bundled up, and sang “I don’t want to live on the moon” from the stoop. The moon was about one-quarter obscured when they could take it no longer, and went up to bed. Apparently, they could also see Saturn and one of the Cani (Canises?) The only constellations that I can readily identify are the Big Dipper and Orion’s Belt.

“Constellations” – groups of stars. The word always reminds me of Compostela. The Shrine of Santiago de Compostela in Spain was one of the three big pilgrimage sites of the Middle Ages. “Campos Stella”, field of stars, was always the most evocative word for me. There was a CD that I had (leant out once, never seen again, now out of print) by the early music group Sequentia (actually the men’s choir subset, called Sons of Thunder or Donnersőhne) singing the pilgrimage music. It was on Deutsche Harmonia Mundi. If anyone can find it, I’d be very grateful.

I do remember back in (what was it?) 1994, when there was a solar eclipse. I was in Hyde Park, Chicago, and I still remember the weird light that the obscured sun cast. The temperature was just as warm (as I look it up, it was May 10, 1994), but is was as if someone had put a piece of translucent linoleum over the sun. It was actually the summer I left the U of C. Maybe the less said about that the better.

After I turned off the TV, at 11:00, I peaked out the front door. The moon was just past being totally obscured. I smiled and headed off to bed.