Any solar eclipse – even the tiniest of partial eclipses – is an event worth watching. I believe that Shakespeare and his colleagues, in a little studied, probably multi-authored play Edward III, were describing a total eclipse even though this was years before the great solar eclipse of 1605. (The full quote opens Chapter 5.) Although it is highly unlikely that Shakespeare ever witnessed a total eclipse of the Sun, he probably heard or read reports about them from those who had. Also, he had the opportunity to witness several partial eclipses from London, including one on July 31, 1590, during which half the Sun was covered by the Moon at maximum. There were other, shallower ones, like the sunset eclipse on August 11, 1589. More important, the great writer's fertile imagination would have allowed him to imagine what a solar eclipse, continued to totality, might have looked like. It is this sense of imagination and dreaming that leads me to believe that he had an eclipse in mind when he wrote (if he wrote) the lines that begin the next chapter; this was a play of multiple authorship.

In July 1990 Steve Edberg and I drove for several hours along back roads to a spot in Northern California where we watched the Sun begin to set.

Whether day ended 400 years ago in Sir John Davies's time, or as it does today, the night sky that has attracted people for thousands of years begins another nightly show. For committed astronomers, amateur or professional, that darkening sky is all that is needed to get our juices flowing. Others require a little more, not just a static display that changes subtly from hour to hour, but something startling, something that crashes upon the celestial stage. A bright meteor, or an eclipse, can spark a lifelong interest in the sky. Eclipses are predictable, and there is usually nothing subtle about them. We can take the experience of an eclipse and put it into a bottle of fond memories. Eclipses show that the sky does change, that the sky is the show that never ends. Eclipses can inspire, and that is why I wrote this guide to getting the most from them.

An eclipse journey

Eclipses are so interesting that some people travel the world to catch them. My wife Wendee and I did this quite literally in late 2003, when we flew across the Atlantic from our home near Tucson, Arizona.

Because eclipses of the Moon are so much more relaxing than those of the Sun, it can be fun to set up your camera and photograph the progress of one. The first thing to recall about night photography involving the sky is: never ever use a flash. If you are trying to photograph the Moon, which averages 240,000 miles distance, it is useless to expect that a small flash attached to a point-and-shoot camera would light up an object so far away. That said, I proudly present a picture (overleaf) that I took of a full Moon taken with a flash, which did not light up the Moon but did fill in the earthly foreground.

The other thing to remember is that eye protection is unnecessary for lunar eclipses. They are perfectly safe to watch and enjoy. The full moon is dazzlingly bright through a telescope, but nowhere near bright enough to damage your eyes. I have taken good pictures of an eclipse just by holding a camera next to the eyepiece of a telescope – a low-power eyepiece, preferably – and snapping some shots.

Using point-and-shoot cameras

The cheapest camera that you can buy these days is a point-and-shoot camera. These little wonders are actually pretty sophisticated. All but the cheapest have built-in light meters that set the exposure automatically.

I love asking children what happens when the Moon gets in between the Sun and the Earth. The answer, of course, is a solar eclipse. And what happens when the Earth gets in between the Moon and the Sun. As the Earth's shadow strikes the Moon, we have a lunar eclipse. So what, I finally ask, happens when the Sun gets between the Earth and the Moon? I love their expressions as they start to think of the absurdity of that ever happening. It is a question that makes them think about the wonderful dance of worlds that results in these eclipses. The most important thing to remember about eclipses, then, is not their cause, but their beauty. For lunar eclipses, our thoughts can ruminate on how the shadow of our troubled Earth can move so gracefully across the Moon, as Thomas Hardy noted after the eclipse of 1903, and whose poem is printed at the opening of the chapter on total lunar eclipses (p. 112).

I think that this is the right way to think of a lunar eclipse, because the shadow that falls upon the Moon is that of the Earth – all the Earth – from its continents and oceans to its people and nations.

After more than half a century of observing, I thought I had seen it all – total solar eclipses, penumbral lunar eclipses, occultations of stars by the Moon, and transits, but as yet I had never seen a planet occulted by the Moon. So it goes without question that I was thrilled at the prospect of seeing the waning crescent Moon swing over Venus in the predawn sky on Wednesday morning, April 22, 2009. While the occultation was visible from much of North America, it was only in Arizona and parts of other surrounding states, where Wendee and I live, that the ingress would take place in a completely dark sky. It would be a highlight of the International Year of Astronomy, which reached its peak during 2009.

So with the best of intentions, and the chance to add something new and different to my observing accomplishments, I set my alarm for 4:30 am (Oh-dark thirty, as an airline pilot friend once commented). But I stepped outside to see the first cloudy sky in several days. I walked to the observatory to go through the motions. However, as my eyes became more dark-adapted, I could see that there was a small break in the clouds toward the east.