It’s 3am. I was warned that there would be cloud but I chose to get out of bed and see for myself since tonight would be the last total lunar eclipse for two and a half years.

I imagine that even the bubbly Mr Jack Horkheimer (Real Player link) is a little less jovial this morning as technology has let us down as well as nature. None of the webcasts are working. It’s raining on the East Antrim camera. It’s raining on the University of North Dakota. The camera in Iran that I was relying on to be clear? Parssky.net could not be found. Please check the name and try again.

Even NASA is timing out.

White light hits the atmosphere, blue light scatters, the red light of every sunrise and sunset simultaneously strikes October’s Hunter’s Moon. It’s the Blood Moon. Or so I’m told.

All this talk of hunters and moons reminds me of a book I scribbled about on a paper bag. I’m going to take a walk down the street for one last look.

And it revolted me. Because it was a thing that, though you couldn’t understand what it was made of, or perhaps precisely because you couldn’t understand, seemed different from all the things in our life, our good things of plastic, of nylon, of chrome-plated steel, duco, synthetic resins, plexiglass, aluminium, vinyl, formica, zinc, asphalt, asbestos, cement, the old things among which we were born and bred. It was something incompatible, extraneous.

It spread out, imposing on our familiar landscape not only its light of an unsuitable colour, but also its volume, its weight, its incongruous substantiality. And then, all over the face of the Earth – the surfaces of the metal plating, iron armatures, rubber pavements, glass domes – over every part of us that was exposed, I felt a shudder pass.

The Soft Moon, TimeAndTheHunter by Italo Calvino