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21 February 2008

Total Eclipse!

Kudos to my sister for calling me up and telling me there was an eclipse going on! I think I'm going to have to find some sort of astronomy calendar to look up cool stuff like this and see if I can't know what's going on. Since the Monkey was sleeping, I had to find a window to watch through, and so there is a slight reflection in some of my pictures, particularly the first bunch that I took. I'm editing it out as much as I can, but I'm no photo editing whiz, so be patient with me!















Once the moon was fully eclipsed, I got to looking around. I took a couple of photos of Saturn, after I took a peek at it through my bird-watching binoculars. I was pretty excited by what I saw in those binoculars: I could see the rings! Only I need to get some sort of stand to put the binoculars on so they don't move too much. The natural movement of the hands is not at all a problem when looking at birds, it's not a serious problem when looking at the moon, although it's a bit annoying, and it's a relatively serious problem when looking at another planet. The image jumped around more than my 17 month old son!

Then I got out my telescope and had another shot at getting it to work. It was still a bit disappointing because I was unable to get it to focus. However, it was a huge improvement on my past attempts because I did manage to get the moon to show up in my telescope! So maybe there's hope for this telescope after all!

After that I took another batch of pictures, but by this time the Monkey was really getting tired of looking at the moon.



And for something a bit whimsical & very cool try this photo, called ten moons, also taken during last night's eclipse.

6 comments:

Keeley said...

Man, you are one AMAZING photographer! Your pictures are excellent.

We had a great time looking at the moon as well. =) It was dang cold outside though.

Keeley said...

I forgot to click the "email me with replies" thing, so I'm posting this one and clicking it....Sorry about the double post. =Þ

Anne Chovies said...

I really like your moon pictures. That's a long way from the day you said you wanted to get some pictures of the moon. You didi it and you've done it well!

Anne Chovies said...

You're getting to e quite a photographer.

Ritsumei said...

Keeley - I cheated: I was inside. My boy was sleeping, so I aimed my camera out an upstairs window. Hence the odd reflections of the moonlight on the glass in the early pictures. But as it got more shadowed, that was less & less of a problem.

Dad - It makes me happy that you like them! I tried to line my camera up with my telescope (the one that was fuzzy-looking, although it did show me the moon!), but it didn't work at all. Guess I'll have to try that again after I learn to focus the telescope.

Anne - thank you.

Aisha said...

Beautiful..so beautiful! Gosh, I wish I have a camera like yours! You're really good!

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