My little girl loves the moon. When she sees it, whether full in borrowed light or a waning sliver as crooked as her grin, everything stops while she looks up, and up. Sometimes she finds it in the blue sky of early morning or late afternoon and always asks me why it’s there, now. I always reply, “Because it fell asleep on the job,” and she always laughs.

“We sent people there once,” I told her when the Super Blood Wolf Moon practically pulled up a chair for dinner last January, and she was agog. “Really? Isn’t it far?” she asked. “Very far,” I told her. “Farther than Grandma and Grandpa’s house?” she asked. Sparing her the metaphysics of how far one actually has to travel in body and spirit to reach southwestern Pennsylvania from any point on the compass, I simply replied, “Way, way farther than that.”

She was impressed as she turned back to gaze upon the wolf moon’s vast face as it rose sideways in majesty behind a line of skeletal winter maples. Watching something that large move — actually being able to measurably perceive its motion — has always left me as astonished as my daughter was in that moment. I understand the science, but it remains a kind of magic to me.