There’s nothing doing on Laurel Street in West Napa at 3 a.m.

The cicadas are hard at work. One car passes every 20 minutes or so. Traffic on nearby Highway 29 is so light that a person can hear individual trucks rumble past.

Binky, the Chihuahua across the street who often can be seen playing a dumb and dangerous game of chicken in the road, is quiet, presumably sleeping indoors. The neighbor’s hot rod has long since roared into the driveway and fallen silent.

On Monday night, even the giant electric smiley face atop the Westwood Hills was turned off, its orange glow not shining down on the neighborhood.

But higher in the sky, far above the top of ridge, a spectacular show took place in the heavens.

Napa, as well as the rest of North America, South America, islands in the Pacific, parts of Asia and even distant Australia got a look at what Napa Valley College Professor John Charlesworth called a “nearly ideal” total lunar eclipse.

For a little more than an hour, the Earth was situated perfectly between the orbiting sun and moon, placing the moon completely in its shadow.

Early in the evening, the nearly full moon gave off a strong white glow in the perfectly clear night sky. Starting just before 2 a.m., a curtain gently drew down. By 2:30 or so, it appeared almost like a typical crescent moon.

But with unusual clarity, even viewers without binoculars or a telescope could see a rim around a moon, a circular band within which less and less was illuminated.

As the moon disappeared into the shadow — or umbra — of the Earth, the occasional plane blinked past on a northward journey, and falling stars streaked briefly across the sky.

As 3 o’clock neared, all that remained of the full moon was a fierce white glow on the bottom rim of the orb.

The darkened circle within the rim turned a pale and mottled red, like an ember from a dying fire or the skin of an old, dried orange. The white glow faded from the edge, leaving only the discolored circle, as if a lit cigarette had been extinguished on a velvet curtain.

According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the moon takes on varied appearances during eclipses, based in part on whether volcanic gas and dust in the Earth’s atmosphere acts as a filter. With little volcanic activity around the globe lately, viewers had a relatively unfiltered view of Tuesday morning’s event.

Mid-eclipse struck at 3:37 a.m. according to a written comment from NVC’s Charlesworth.

“Lunar eclipses are more common than most people realize, occurring twice a year,” he wrote. “Half of Earth is situated to see each eclipse (the other half having daytime), so chances are that you can see one lunar eclipse (either total or partial) each year — on the average.”

Between 4 and 5 a.m., the moon was well to the west and the intense white glow had returned, but this time on the top of the moon. The glow grew stronger and occupied more of the moon’s surface as the orb arced behind the dark outlines of the oak trees atop the Westwood hills.

Before Tuesday morning, the last total eclipse visible throughout North America was on Oct. 28, 2004. The next total lunar eclipse visible here will be on Feb. 21 2008, according to Charlesworth.