Thursday, February 21, 2008

Eclipsed

I’m probably the only dorkus in this part of the world who stayed up to watch the lunar eclipse (it peaked at 5:01 am our time), but this is the first time in a really long while that I’ve had such spectacular views of the sky from my own place of residence, and I couldn’t resist it. I was hoping to get some halfway decent pictures and video of it, but our camera is not really eclipse quality, so the moon, which was as big as life to my naked eye, looked like a tiny little dot through the camera, and once the eclipse peaked all you could see through the camera was darkness. Of course I had to drag my husband out of bed once I realized the pictures wouldn’t be so good, because honestly, how often in life do circumstances come together so perfectly for you to view such an event? He actually didn’t mind, and came out to the balcony with me quite willingly.

Normally the moon lights up our balcony quite brightly, so much so that the street lights are rather inconsequential, but when I went out a few minutes before the peak of the eclipse the darkness took me a bit by surprise. I had a few minutes of unnecessary panic early on when I wondered if it was indeed ok to look at a lunar eclipse directly (because if it wasn’t surely I would be blind any second), but then I thought to myself, “you can look at the moon, dummy, why can’t you look at a lunar eclipse?” That is just one example of the mindless drama that goes through my head on an hourly basis.

For what it’s worth, I did take a couple of pictures and here is the video I took of different stages of the eclipse. Just don’t expect anything spectacular.




2 comments:

Rositta said...

Kind of reminds me of my picture quality, I too need/want a new camera. It was a fabulous eclipse though...ciao

melusina said...

We had a good camera but it was lost/stolen in Wales. =( I love lunar eclipses, I hope we can see the next one in 2010!