Last Wednesday, February 20th, there was a full lunar eclipse that was visible from my back yard.  There was speculation in the local media that we might miss it because of cloud cover; but, luckily the weather-persons had it wrong.  It was a beautiful evening for sky watching.

I took my new JVC HDD camera outside on a tripod and started filming just after the eclipse started.  The beauty of this camera is that I didn’t have to replace tapes twice during the event.  All I had to do was reposition the moon in the video frame to compensate for the rotation of the earth and during the total eclipse where the moon was completely in the umbra I switched my camera to a 1/2 shutter speed to capture the orange-red glow I saw with my unaided eye.

I took three hours of video, transfered it (faster than real time!) onto my hard drive, edited out the parts where I was moving the tripod, time lapsed it (5136.63%) to make the video two minutes and twenty two seconds (well, it had to match the music length), and published it here on the web for your viewing pleasure. 

I could have had all that done the next day, if I didn’t have a job or a life.

While looking for information on this lunar eclipse, I stumbled across... OK, I didn’t stumble across anything; I was systematically searching through each and every solar eclipse that was going to happen in my lifetime.  I really want to see (and capture on video) a full solar eclipse.  Lo and behold, on August 21st, 2017 (a mere nine years from now) there will be a full and complete solar eclipse (of the sun even) close to my home.  I was thinking we would have to cruise or fly some where to see one.  But I only have to wait nine years for it to happen here where I live. 

Below is the 4.8MB FLV video made for web streaming.  If you’d like to download the 29.4MB quicktime mov file, feel free.  I’m not offering the 49GB of DV footage I have for download, but if you really want it, I’ll burn it to disk and ship it to you for a reasonable licensing fee plus my time and materials (or perhaps a trade: an external Firewire Blue Ray burner and discs would be practical -- I could then ship you one disk with all the footage on it).

Oh, come on... maybe someone other than my friends or family will read this page -- it is in google after all.  If you’re not a friend or family member please drop me email at my yahoo account, my username is on my About Me page, I’m sure I’m going to need it as proof to stop the laughter over that last side note in the parenthesis above.

Enjoy.