Staring at the Moon

So at 8.50 pm GMT my phone alarm went off. For a moment, in my post-dinner television watching I was utterly confused as to why it had gone off. When I remembered, I stepped onto my balcony to see if I could find the moon.

Earlier today, one of my Inestimable Work Colleagues happened upon the news that the International Space Station was going to cross the moon over Irish skies tonight. We were excited and I thought it would be a good idea to put an alarm on my phone as I tend to promptly forget about such cool things. Which I did, and which found me on my balcony, staring intently at the sky visible over our complex, much to the bemusement of my homeward bound neighbours.

I popped in to Child of Chaos to tell her the sad news that the moon was not visible. She informed me that on her way back from the shop, she had seen the moon from across the road. With only minutes to spare, shoes and coats were donned and we were off, with me texting my Young Man on the way to inform him of the situation.

On the way over, we saw two men about our age standing across the road, outside what we presumed to be their apartment complex, staring at the part of the sky where Child of Chaos said the moon would be, so we decided they must be out to see it too. At 8.57 pm, when the ISS was supposed to be rising from the horizon (which I hoped I had remembered correctly), we were across the road and caught sight of the moon.

There were two problems. One, it was setting behind our building. Two, it was only a crescent.

We kept backing up until the only option was moonwatching in the busy street, so while I kept an eye on the moon, Child of Chaos pushed the button for the pedestrian lights and let me know when it was safe to cross. The other side provided not only the space to back up and look at the moon, but also a handy signpost. I was still worried though; the moon looked blurry and was that yellowish colour it becomes as it sets. And then the clouds came. And then, to add insult to injury and to cause me to cry out in despair, "Dude!", two double decker buses came.

It was cold so we decided to Google when it was supposed to cross. That yielded nothing. We were convinced we'd seen something move slowly across the moon and wondered if it were the ISS. So we checked Youtube. Apparently, This is what it looks like when the ISS crosses the moon. Take a minute to go look. Go on, you know you want to...

With our visibility, there was no hope of seeing it. We came in at 9.10 pm GMT, and, as Child of Chaos said, even if we didn't see it, it was still great to be watching the moon when it happened.

Even knowing it was cold outside, and that we might not see it, and not knowing quite what we were looking for, it was the right thing to do. I will talk often and at length to anyone who will listen that we need to get off this planet, if only for the heavy metals. I have argued with Child of Chaos that if we wait to solve our problems here, we will lose our chance to move out into the solar system because we will have expended our resources. I genuinely believe that we need a great grand project of our age and that project should be a space elevator. We need to get into space to survive, but also for ourselves. The history of mankind has taken place under the stars. We have prayed to them, sang about them, imagined being out there. We can't keep being the young children who have just learned to walk, standing at the glass door, looking out into the treacherous back garden. We need to start going out there, start walking among the stars. We'll fall down (a lot), but we'll find our footing far more surely than if we just stay here. There is so much out there and yes, we have our problems here. But without finding more resources, we're only going to make them worse. And we are explorers; we need to keep finding the next horizon. True, we don't have a history of doing it the right way, but we're better than we were. We're always learning how to be better than we were. The days when humanity is the best and brightest it could be are far ahead of us but they're not impossible. We can get there. We just have to get out there first.

And sometimes that just starts with two girls, standing in the cold, staring at the moon.