On especially clear nights the ride home from work has been stunning. In the absence of cars, with my night vision finally upon me, I’d have been able (although not daring enough) to ride without any front light. The fields have a milky-white glow, as though revealing that they harbour some vast vegetable intellect. Tarmac is grey, paler than daytime tarmac. Shadows are surprisingly sharp, and animals in pasture are visible, especially the horses that peep over the hedge in Ramsden and the sheep that are incredibly confused by the clank and whirr of a bicycle up Finstock Hill.
These past few evenings, though, have been exceptionally bright. As crb implies, this is because (if you haven’t already heard one of the Today presenters stumbling over the concepts) the moon is relatively close and high in the sky. Indeed, leaving at around six or seven p.m. became tremendously confusing, so similar was it to the twilight of four-thirtyish. It certainly takes the sting out of the trip home to be apparently making it in early evening rather than dead of night. My heul, so absent throughout mid- to late Autumn, has finally returned.
The precession of the moon—relative to my point on the earth’s surface, I might add—over the course of several months has surprised me too. Right now the moon is high in the sky for much of the night, which means that it rises and sets as the sun sets and rises. Over the next few days, however (and forgive me if, in the middle of all my calculations and scrawled diagrams based on experience, I have this wrong), it will rise later and later, leaving the early evening darker and darker and bringing high moon closer to sunrise. But with an eight-hour day, of course, the sixteen-hour night is never fully without the moon. Even in the coldest, darkest, loneliest climates that the year experiences, there is still a glimmer of hope.
Small Beds and Large Bears 