Thursday, June 16, 2011

Total (Lunar) Eclipse of the Heart

Last night, we witnessed a particularly awesome sight.  A relatively rare central, total lunar eclipse - which means that the center of the earths shadow passes directly across the moon.  It was pretty wild, but SO UNBELIEVABLY SLOW.  The moon disappeared for 1 hour 40 minutes and 52 seconds.  Since my attention span for this event was approximately 14 minutes, it made getting these shots particularly difficult.  Setup, shoot, wait, get bored, run back to camera when I remembered there was an eclipse and I left the camera sitting out, and so on.  But as you can see, it was pretty cool.  When the moon was "gone", it was still visible in the faint red light coming from around the Earth. I managed to snap all of the shots above, but a better photographer here at the National managed to get this with a fancy-schmancy telescope camera:
Telescope: 2000 dhs.   Camera: 5000 dhs.  Shoving it in your friends face when you get this lucky picture after buying a telescope in a city where you can't see more than 10 feet through the haze?  Priceless.

1 comment:

jimdad said...

So glad you got to see this - and pass it on. Over here everyone was talking about how spectacular it was going to be, but "Too bad it won't be visible to us over here."

Thanks for proving them wrong.