Mark your calendar!

I was well served by coincidence this morning.

About a half-century ago I went to the Naval Observatory in Washington (where our astronomy club maintained a small telescope) the night of a total lunar eclipse.  It had snowed heavily, and when the moon rose, its light turned the landscape blood red.  An amazing, numinous sight.

I was in my early teens, greatly interested in astronomy.  A few years later, I went off to college and majored in that celestial science, at least partly because the eclipse had moved me so.

I'd love to have that happen to my viewpoint character in the current novel, when she was a young girl deciding what to do with her life.  She could be in Washington then, but how often do total lunar eclipses happen at a given place?  My instincts said every couple of years.

I was writing in a café without WiFi, so I couldn't look it up until I got home.

It worked out fine.  My character's born in 2035, and there's a proper lunar eclipse on New Year's Eve, 2048!  Her mother's an astronomer, and might well take her to the Naval Observatory, a small island of darkness in the Washington glare.

Hmm . . . I'll be 104 that year.  Maybe they'll wheel me outside so I can use my cybernetic eyes and enjoy the sight . . .

Joe