A Harvest Moon and Luna 2

(Originally published on Kiltr 16 days ago)

The Harvest Moon rose heavy over the hills of Navitie and Benarty, its reddening hue, as nightfall and the penumbral eclipse drew near, setting the sun and welcoming a planet's longest serving satellite’s rise with the coming pass of shadow, colouring the land formation they make, known locally as the Sleeping Soldier or the Sleeping Giant dependent upon disposition, with Autumnal fiery hues. The outer edge of Earth’s darkening chased light across Loch Leven like a laird betrayed, raging in pursuit of infamy and an escaped captive both. On nights like this portents of hope and of foreboding are born into the imaginations of humankind. Not only of scrying and future sight, these visions, but of looks to the past too, beyond the scales of victors' eyes written in history and of tributes to their penmanship.

This celestial array seemed that to me then, honorific not only of the equinox and penumbra’s passing across the scarred face of Luna but to history’s diminutives of it too, of one landed there some fifty seven years since. The stretch of barely conceived of technologies which made it possible, made all other such landings possible, not least that feted mission a decade later, is not told now much, as part of our story, because it was eclipsed too by that climactic moment in what we came to call the Space Race; because the victors of that history would have us believe a demon was slain, perhaps we know a demon they created, but on July 20th 1969, it was slain nonetheless, when Apollo 11 'won'.

Just a decade earlier though a sombre voice crackled through radio diodes and told the world part of a different story, it declared, ‘Attention, Moscow speaking. Today the 14th of September at 00.02:24, Moscow time, the second Soviet cosmic rocket reached the surface of the moon. It is the first time in history that a cosmic flight has been made to another celestial body’.

A fledgeling NASA, born just two years before in reaction to the Sputnik missions, struggled to comprehend the success of their nemesis. Their scientists, not for the last caught in an arrogance of hubris, believed Luna 1, ancestor of this success, glorious in its demonstration of Soviet guidance systems failings, shooting wide of the moon’s moving target by some 3,725 miles, was testament to the challenges ahead. As Vanguard TV3 exploded on its launchpad, becoming ‘Kaputnik’, at Cape Canaveral, NASA prayed the race was a paced marathon and not the sprint Sputniks 1&2, with the unlikely heroine Laika provoking a nation's mourning in their triumph, seemed to indicate.

Like Sputnik, Luna 2 was spherical and antennae protruded across its surface, for detection and broadcast; geiger counters, radiation and micrometeorite detectors and a magnetometer bristled there. These mapped the Van Allen radiation belt surrounding Earth, tested if the moon was encircled with a similar ring of magnetically charged particles and, as the little probe who could descended to hard land on the moon’s surface, with a final flourish released a cloud of orange sodium gas in orbit, not only so observatories could see its trajectory but also so the dissipation of gas in the vacuum of space could be observed. British scientists dismissed any claims of Soviet subterfuge by intercepting the final transmissions at Jodrell Bank Observatory, confirming the unprecedented success of the mission. Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev, due to arrive in Washington on 15th September, for a high profile tour of the US, came armed with bragging rights no one had ever before had.

It no longer mattered to Krushchev to have been banned from Disneyland, 73 pages of a security pamphlet issued of instructions for his safety during the trip unable apparently to guarantee it there, when he handed President Eisenhower an honorary replica of the sphere shaped ‘pennants’ Luna 2 had left across the lunar surface before it finally ended its mission.

Fitting then on this anniversary to be watching the sky, to see the moon tinged orange and red, as if that flourish of gas burst had enveloped it since. Better still that beyond the flaring of Mossmorran’s petrochemical stacks into the local skies of our home, which have lit them up this week and which prompted a young tourist couple, walking earnestly toward the orange pulsing horizon, to ask me what this was, just the night before; better still that as I tried in vain, between the failings of language and incredulity, to explain, I could draw upon the promise of nature’s shade and light show to come the night after, still able yet to eclipse all of humankind’s follies and achievements, just. Eight years until there will be another eclipse like it, what kind of changed Earth, with all humankind can muster writ large across the mid morning of the Anthropocene, will it shadow then?

(This is first of an occasional series intended to fuse folkways and observances with contemporary narratives; it's likely to be a little more 'poetic' than usual, I'm loosely calling it 'Howked Fae the Digital Dreel')