Moonspear moonlight outshines the brightest stars

Takes place the evening of June 30, 2017.

Happy National Meteor Watch Day, Moonspear!

The end of the month was marked by what felt like a particularly early sunset. The sun seemed in a hurry to dip below the horizon, leaving in its wake a brilliant green flash, quick as an errant thought. The cloudless summer sky was a swirl of purples and blues; and when the waxing gibbous moon tiptoed up through the tenebrae, her light shone especially brightly.

Though the moon was still about a week shy of her full illumination, her unnatural luminescence and the pale cyan halo that appeared around her made it seem that she’d skipped ahead in the lunar cycle. Moondogs glimmered to life like a pair of symmetrical parentheses — and then, in scant trickles at first, the stars began to dance across the sky.

They came in ones and twos — trios and quartets, quintets and sextets — and then they lanced the darkness in the tens and twenties, filling the balmy summer night with kaleidoscopic light. The stelliferous light show was bound to last for a few days at least, but this was its brightest hour.
Moonspear was perhaps the most ideal place to watch such an otherworldly display of beauty and energy; its high reaches and wide ledges were illuminated with prismatic light, particularly on the mountain’s northern face. The flat ridges and plains, elevated above the rest of the Teekons, made the sky seem even wider and the stars’ smiling arcs appeared to go on for eons.

posted by coelacanth.