Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Total Lunar Eclipse, Part II

I was born 28 days after my due date.  In the middle of summer.  My parents, tired of people asking if I'd been born yet, just stopped answering the phone.  This wouldn't happen these days, but it happened then.  Early in my mom's pregnancy, as legend goes, one of my elderly Polish relatives (maybe my great-grandmother?) put her hand on my mother's stomach and said that the child (me) would wait for the ninth cycle of the moon.

I was born on the night of a total lunar eclipse, a fairly major one of the last century.  My mother relays the story that, while she was in labor, the doctor, nurse, and my father were on the roof of the hospital watching the eclipse. 

Today is another such total lunar eclipse, though it isn't visible over North America, sadly.  It is, however, momentous in that is the first Inex series lunar eclipse since the night of my birth.  According to Wikipedia, "the Inex series repeat eclipses 20 days short of 29 years, repeating on average every 10571.95 days."

I actually think this is a much cooler marker of time than a birthday...

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