Celebrating the Return of The Light

 
I'm surprised, this morning, to realize that it's been a couple of years since I've blogged about the Winter Solstice Celebration, but it's still an important milestone for me. Indeed, “the Return of The Light” truly is a grand reason to celebrate; I never miss the chance to recognize it. Most years at our UUC Groton Church my sweetie and I look forward to a Winter Solstice celebration, but this year we didn't get to do that; I'm not sure why.

But this year we have another celestial phenomena that coincides with Winter Solstice 2010 — a full Lunar Eclipse, captured marvelously by YouTube's "peteherron", embedded below…

Click on the "Play" Icon on the right to watch the video which shows an amazingly smooth time lapse of the eclipse, compiled from shots with a still camera on a rotating telescope mount. Wow! Due to cloud cover, I didn't get to watch the eclipse though we had planned a "wee hours" sauna so we could be out there watching the shadow of the earth creep ever so slowly across the face of the moon… An article from The Huffington Post today quotes a Montreal Gazette article with a NASA claim: “the last time these astronomical events took place in sync was on Dec 21st, 1638, — 456 years ago — and it won't happen again until at least 2094”. Imagine: even my grand kids (not that I have any) could be dead by then!

Another thing to note is that this was also the first morning this Fall when I woke up to an overnight snow fall — our back yard was completely white, though a lot of that has melted as you can see in this picture of our dog, Lady, on the Winter Solstice day, 2010. Not to worry… there'll be lots more from where that came from; I'm sure !