Having finished every chore we could think of that needed to be done before we left Sydney for good, we went looking for somewhere nice to stay over the weekend.
Because we have to be in Gosford on Monday, we visited every caravan park we could find in Terrigal, Avoca, Long Jetty and Toowoon Bay. None looked inviting so we headed for The Entrance North where we had stayed before. The site we had occupied then, which overlooked the beach, is now a building site. We had run out of options so we booked in anyway only to end up on the best site in the park right on the lake opposite The Entrance and at the extreme end of the line.
We spent a pleasant lay day in the Motley, out of the wind, watching the numerous birds on the lake.
On Sunday night, we observed, in clear sky, a total eclipse of the moon. It was pretty impressive taking about an hour to reach totality and staying total for a further couple of hours. The shadow of the earth is visibly much greater in diameter than the diameter of the moon (unlike a solar eclipse where the obscuring moon is visibly the same size as the sun).
During the development of the eclipse, the shadow starts out pretty dark but close observation reveals that the moon is still visible in the shadow. At totality the whole moon is visible as a dull orange disk which gets darker as the centre of the eclipse is approached.
The whole processed is then reversed over the next couple of hours.
It is so easy to cope with these strange sights from our position of being in possession of detailed models of the solar system but one can somehow imaging how easy it was in earlier times to frighten the living daylights out of a suspicious populus.
This was the longest eclipse in this part of the world for past 140 years and for the next 1000 years.
We were privileged tonight to witness one of the rare observable phenomena of our universe.