Skies remained clear enough just before dawn to show off the start of this morning's total eclipse of the moon. I hauled myself out of the sack at 5 a.m., threw on some clothes and drove to a nearby parking lot with a good view to the west.

As early commuter traffic began trickling down the state road to my south, I watched for about a half hour as the full August "Fruit Moon" drifted into the darkest part of the Earth's shadow. It was the moon's upper edge that dipped into the "umbra" first. With the urban light pollution and slowly brightening skies, the expanding shadowed portion of the otherwise brilliant full moon became all but invisible to the naked eye. 

Through binoculars, however, it had that dull, reddish hue that makes lunar eclipses so eerie. Somehow, that ochre light - the reflected light from all the sunsets and sunrises underway on the Earth - always gives the moon a distinctly spherical appearance that you don't see with a normally illuminated moon. The "regular" moon looks like a flat disk - a big, silvery tiddlywink.

But this eclipsed moon looked like the big ball that it is. And, as I watched, the shadowed portion spread across what remained of the sunlit slice. Here's how others saw it.

As I stood there in the dark, with my 10x50 binocs and drive-time radio in my earbuds, somebody pulled into the parking lot in a huge SUV. He drove around for a minute, then settled in behind me, his engine running. I assumed he was watching the eclipse, like me. After a few minutes, he got out of the truck, stood beside the driver's door and snapped a flash picture. A flash picture? Did he think his point-and-shoot would light up the moon? I chuckled, and he drove off to resume his pre-dawn commute.

By 5:35 or so - still 20 minutes before the period of totality began, all that remained of the moon that was visible to the naked eye was the sliver of a lunar "smile" - the only bit that was still in direct sunlight. And then the smear of clouds along the horizon swallowed the moon, and the show was over.

Read more about it here.

The next total lunar eclipse is on Feb. 20, 2008. If the weather cooperates, it will be visible here, from start to finish, at a much more convenient (evening) hour.