Thoughts on seeing a new moon

Some years ago we took a vacation in mid-June in the Scottish Highlands. To be accurate we rented a cottage not far from Fort William close by Loch Ness, the deepest lake in the British Isles and near Ben Nevis, the highest peak in Scotland. A miracle occurred in that it forgot to rain for the whole week, so the evenings were beautiful and very, very long. As I recall, darkness was never complete, but what passed for it lasted from just after eleven until about half past two.

Digging even further back into the mists of time, I remember as a child, living in South Yorkshire, going to bed and falling asleep before it got properly dark.

Now that doesn’t happen here. On the longest day, dusk passes into night not long after eight in the evening. I have never really got used to the idea of night falling so early in summer, but tonight one of the advantages showed as I drove back home across Beirut. It’s the first day of the lunar month and that means a new moon; the tiniest sliver of golden (not silver, whatever the songs might say) crescent showed just above the horizon at dusk. It is one of the narrowest new moon crescents I recall seeing and it became more distinct by the second as the daylight rapidly faded, possibly because it was only occasionally visible through the infrequent gaps between buildings. By the time I got home, night had properly fallen and the new moon had chased the sun down below the horizon, leaving Venus as the brightest object in the evening sky.

The magic of the heavens still has the power to engender awe and wonder. So do we plan our next vacation where we can see more of the night sky? No, because it is quite literally everywhere, all we have to do is to look up and we too can have our senses and imaginations fired just like the ancient Greeks and Romans, the thinkers like Einstein and Newton and the inspirational dreamers like JFK setting the target of putting a man on the moon.

Short and partial as that night-time in Scotland was, I remember us all going outside one night to watch a shower, not of rain, but of shooting stars.