Lunar Eclipse, May 26, 2021

Abstract

In May 2021, a lunar eclipse took place that was clearly visible from my hometown, Brisbane, Australia. This painting (Fig. 1) is a semifigurative depiction of the lunar eclipse. The painting owes something to the nonfigurative style of Wassily Kandinsky (b. 1866–d. 1944), who was a giant in abstract art in the first half of the 20th century (1), notable for both his color theory and his synesthesia (he could experience color as sound, and vice versa). This instance of total eclipse was short in duration (19 min) because the moon passed close to the edge of the earth’s umbra (2), with a sliver of reflected white light remaining visible along the left edge of the moon. This is represented in the painting, along with the track of the moon through the umbra. If the orbits of earth and moon were in the same plane, one would expect to see total lunar eclipses every month; however, they are observable only once every 5 or so years (by an observer at the same location on the earth’s surface), as a consequence of the 5-degree inclination of the moon’s orbit from the plane of earth’s orbit around the sun (the ecliptic) (3). In this painting, the artist has drifted somewhat from a strictly nonfigurative style. It also contains a hidden message in Morse code. That, I will leave the observer to decode.