Lunar eclipse

For the most of last week, I was in Sarawak with my wife and daughter. Overall, we spent five days there (but my daughter had six days there, having arrived with her friends one day before us) of which two days were in Kuching and three in the Mulu national park. I wouldn't want to elaborate on our trip to Sarawak yet but confine this story to the moon.

The moon from Santubong on the evening of the 13th of July.

Yes, the moon. Because on the first day, we went to the Sarawak Cultural Village in Santubong where the 22nd Rainforest World Music Festival was going on. While waiting for the main event in the evening to start, I glanced right above us and there, the gibbous moon in its 11th day of waxing was looking down on us revellers. The moon wasn't totally round yet but there it was, ascending in the early evening sky with a very bright Jupiter trailing slightly below it.

Over the next two nights while we were at Mulu, I saw the moon waxing further. On the first night, the moon was very clear and bright, totally unaffected by any city lights. But for most parts, it was obscured by the folliage around the national park. On the second night that we were there, some dense clouds covered the moon and it couldn't be seen very well.

The moon from Mulu on the evening of 14th of July.

By the fourth day, we had already returned to Kuching. That evening, we walked along the waterfront. Above us was the moon, now very much rounder and only a day away from it at its fullest. Admittedly, I didn't pay much attention to it at all although it turned up in several shots taken by my wife on her mobile phone.

I awoke before dawn of the fifth day and staggered to the hotel room's window for no apparent reason. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the moon to the right but it looked kinda funny to me. Strange, I thought to myself, now more fully awake. Only a few hours earlier, the moon had been full and round but now, at 5.40am in the morning, it looked thin and elongated.

The moon from Kuching in the early hours of 17th of July.

I groped for the camera and managed to get a few snapshots in the dark. Magnifying one of the images, I got a shock. This was what I saw: a crescent moon! How on earth could a fully rounded moon become a crescent moon within a matter of a few hours? I couldn't explain it. How strange indeed!

During daylight a few hours later, I finally learnt the truth: that while most of us were asleep, there was a partial lunar eclipse that could be seen from much of Asia. If you were awake in Malaysia, anywhere from Perlis to Sabah, at five o'clock in the morning, you would have seen the eclipse at its maximum. I was lucky to have woken up at the right time on the 17th of July, or else I wouldn't have witnessed this celestial sight at all.

Postscript: The full moon day on the 16th of July also happened to be the 50th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, the space mission which took Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon. Armstrong and Aldrin would go on to become the first and second men to walk on the moon four days later. That there was a lunar eclipse on the anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11 was indeed coincidental.