Moon over Mount Vernon

Yet another interruption to the wedding story...

Earlier this week I came across an article on MSN that said the moon would look unusually large on Wed., June 18th (see related article here). Apparently when the moon is physically closer to the horizon, it looks bigger to human eyes... even though it's the same 3,000 kilometers around it's always been (about 1/4 the size of Earth).

So last night at 11, just as I was getting ready for bed, this tidbit of information rose to the top of the brain checklist for a moment. To do: go look at moon. Okay then!

I should stop here and say that moon-viewing in my neck of the woods is fabulous. Every night it looks like a Halloween picture at our house because you've got to look through sky-scraper-esque trees to see that big melon in the sky. So once you actually get the moon in sight, it's framed in perfectly by tree boughs (and on cloudy nights, you just wait for the witch to fly on her broomstick across the face of the moon).

Wanting to check this task off my to-do list (yep, I'm a type A), I sauntered out the front door and began carefully picking my way through the front yard toward one of the clearings in our "front 9." Once you step about five feet off our front porch, you're encased in total blackness, so this can be challenging given that our lawn has booby traps like the fuel oil pipe, tree branches (every time it rains), mole tunnels and other assorted critters running about.

I made it to the clearing without tripping over anything and was able to get my first good look at nature's wonder. Wow, what a moon! It was big, round, bright and seemed to just droop with the weight of itself in the sky. You could see more detail on its rocky surface—some dark and light patches—that are normally hard to make out without the aid of a telescope.

Ever the girl scout (I was really, a Brownie and Junior Girl Scout back in the day), I whipped out my original model Kodak Easy Share (circa 2001 or so) digital camera, aimed at this glorious sight and clicked the button. The flash poofed and I held my breath waiting for the image to appear on my camera's tiny 1-inch screen. The anticipation was killing me!

What appeared what comical. A dot—a tiny white dot in a chasm of black. There was no swaying tree bough, no dark and light moonscape, no fluffy cloud (and no witch on a broom). It was utterly disappointing... just as I expected.

Regardless, I wanted a memory of that droopy moon. So I now present to you this glorious work of photography. I'm sure the Pulitzer Prize committee will be interested in it.



I know, it looks like a slurpy star. I attribute that quality to those lush tree boughs I was talking about earlier, of course.

Either way, here's what my moon close up should have looked like (sans trees):