Lunar eclipse

The prospect of seeing the moon blood-red was to my mind worth the effort of setting the alarm for 3.15am. To say that I leapt out of bed would be an exaggeration but mind eventually won over matter and I drew back the curtains and peered up into the sky to see the moon, not its usual brilliant shining self, but a dull, glowing sphere. To my great disappointment there was not a touch of haemoglobin about it.
I had a very different experience once on holiday in Mexico. I was travelling around part of the country, enjoying a mix of Mayan remains and beaches and the pyramid at Chichen Itza was going to be one of the highlights of the trip. When I arrived there, there must have been a thousand people. Golly, this is a popular site, I thought. On closer inspection, there were hundreds of hippies with flowing hair and beards, wearing long florrid robes. They told me that it was the spring equinox and that this was the day to visit the pyramid. All became clear later that afternoon. The sun was going down and at one particular point its rays hit the top of the pyramid, went through a structure which the Mayans had built on the top and the light came down the other side of the pyramid, in a zigzag, slowly descending from side to side, like a snake, until it reached the bottom. The Mayans were accomplished astronomers and on the equinox the priest used to dress up as their great god, the plumed serpent Quetzalcoatl, the people used to gather around and he would invoke the god just before the sun got to the necessary point for the light to do its tricks. That really was amazing.