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.