The Clouds Won Last Night

The odds were in their favor, as we saw all day yesterday. I did not have my hopes up and I wasn’t disappointed.

I got up at 02:30, about the time the partial phases were supposed to be starting.

I sort of remember wandering around to look out the window about 04:00-ish – there as a dim reddish spot in the clouds over in the west, but nothing that prevented a quick retreat to a warm bed.

A few hours later, of course:

That’s a stunning shade of blue – where was it ten hours earlier?

Even toward the west, where the coast and the haze and the “coastal eddy,” “May gray,” “June gloom” always lurk, it was unlimited visibility.

The next total lunar eclipse for the US West Coast is November 8, 2022, seventeen and a half months away. I’m sure the weather forecast is for clouds. (Yes, there’s an earlier total lunar eclipse on May 16, 2022, just under a year away, but it’s occurring just as the moon is rising in Los Angeles, so we might not see much of it at all.)