Eclipse

And God made the two great lights - the greater light to rule the day,
and the lesser light to rule the night - and the stars.
Genesis 1:16

It was an annular eclipse, with the moon's shadow moving right across central Kenya. For a few minutes, the moon was directly in front of the sun. Because it happened to be farther from earth than usual, it appeared smaller, and did not block the sun entirely, as it would in a total eclipse.

Nonetheless, it was a spectacular sight, and the first eclipse I'd ever seen that was not just a partial one.

I was late for rounds on Friday morning as I set up a tripod in the back yard for my camera, and made a little pin-hole viewer for extra safe viewing. Others on their way to work stopped to see what was going on, and for a little while we had a small group gazing through dark filters at this wonderful event in the sky.

Isn't it amazing that the sizes and orbits of the earth and the moon would be such that the moon appears almost exactly the same size as the sun, and now and then passes directly in front of it? What a beautiful thing!

One night recently, I was walking back from the hospital at 5:00 AM. The bright Southern Cross was high in the sky to the south, and Mars was glowing bright orange to the north. Awesome! Isn't God's creation amazing?

In our modern world we tend to look ahead and down too much of the time, and not enough toward the sky. There's much to be seen there.

- Doug