Gratitude Monday: Balloon moon

You might be aware that Saturday night we were treated to the supermoon phenomenon. That's when a new (or in this case a full) moon coincides with the closest approach it makes to Earth in its elliptical orbit.

If you want the technical term, it’s the perigee-syzygy of Earth, moon and sun. What it means is that the moon looks huge and it shines really bright.

Well, it does, of course, unless you’ve got full-blanket cloud cover. Which never happens here in the Valley they call Silicon, because clouds connote a blot on the perfection of paradise, and people here take that sort of thing personally.

Only, of course, Sod’s Law being in operation, we had cloud cover Saturday night.

However—and here’s what I’m grateful for today—I went out a few times between 2130 and 2215, when the clouds were only starting to drift in from whatever corner of the universe they usually hide away in.

It was beautiful to look above and away from the electric colors of El Camino Real, over the 200-unit apartment buildings and the trailer park, beyond the rusty-mustard mercury lamps of the parking lot—up into the darkness, where just the moon gave light, and reflected against the incoming clouds.

I don’t have a tripod, so I just leaned up against the building hoping the neighbors wouldn’t come out and see me in my sleepy-time outfit. Here’s what I saw:

And this one caught just a bit of the trailer park:

I went out again around 2300, and the sky was completely blanketed. Couldn’t even see the moon behind the cover because of the city lights reflecting off the Earth-side of it. 

So I’m really grateful that I went out to see the supermoon before the clouds rendered it invisible. And I'm grateful for the show it gave me.