Only one of our dogs was interested in a 3:00 a.m. stroll. So Betsy, our big black dog and I bundled up and set out in search of last night's total lunar eclipse. We spent a half hour during totality looking up and waiting for a break in the clouds, but none came, and we did not see the moon.
As James Carroll wrote (in a different context entirely), yesterday's solstice was the shortest day and the deepest night, and for my money, the darkest night, too, at least for a full moon. There wasn't a peep of light from the other side of those clouds. When Betsy would run out a little ahead, she'd disappear.
The weather was better elsewhere. People in Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Nebraska and elsewhere posted their photos to SpaceWeather. And Laurence Mitchell caught the eclipse from Norwich, U.K., just at sunrise (see his comment).
So now we'll wait for the next total lunar eclipse. It's next July. It's not visible in North America but the following one is, on 10 December, 2011. Here's NASA's list of upcoming lunar eclipses.
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