Meow At The Moon

I think I need a tripod:





Out of 35 shots, those were the best images I got of the Lunar Eclipse on Wednesday night. I couldn't hold the camera steady enough, even if I knelt and rested it on my knee. And, after playing with a decent digital camera for two years, I finally figured out some of the different settings and adjustments. With the longest exposure and widest aperture, I could get more than a red blob. But the steady thing was still a problem which is why I got some unintentional but cool effects. Finally, I remembered I owned a music stand, and using that as a makeshift tripod worked the best. The part of the moon not in shadow was still a bit bright though, so maybe I had the aperture too wide. I experimented, but didn't get much better, and started to worry about the neighbors looking out their bedroom window and getting the wrong idea when they saw me with a camera aimed up at the moon beyond their house. If you want to see a real photographer with a better camera tackle the same subject, click here and here.

Wednesday turned out to be rather cosmic. The Navy successfully shot down that falling satellite. In case anyone wasn't following that story as intently as those of us wondering if Cloverfield's viral campaign had extended to legitimate news, one of our satellites malfunctioned and was coming down fast. The fuel was pretty toxic and lethal, as much a concern as a metal object the size of a truck hitting a populated area. So there was a small window to detonate the fuel in the upper atmosphere and break the thing into smaller pieces safely over the ocean. I don't eat seafood, so I'll be immune to the pending mutations resulting from contaminated fish. They also destroyed it over the Pacific, so debris won't be a problem either here on the East coast.

Satellites are things we take for granted. From weather to espionage to research and more, various countries have these artificial bodies in orbit. Thankfully it's not that common for one to break orbit and be affected by gravity, and while it's happened before this is the first time I was aware of one falling. It's been strange these last few days hearing news reports that sound like science fiction casually mixed in with other human interest stories. “...and so, the military has one shot to destroy the plummeting object. Now, we go live to Brooklyn and see what a rascally puppy has done...”

One of my friends, while not exactly a conspiracy theorist, is convinced that there's more out there than is divulged to the general public. He monitors various stories for the day scientists confirm the existence of Bigfoot, for example. We're trained to doubt, to dismiss such things as drunken sightings from people who need a DVD player or a video game system. Logically, could there be some kind of undiscovered mammal living deep in wooded areas, some near extinct species? Is the notion of aliens so far-fetched given the scope of the universe? Did God only create life on one world in the vastness of space? A lot of these things are improbable, but that's not the same thing as impossible.

Anyway, my friend monitors these things, and pointed out another interesting story on Wednesday. A Meteor apparently struck near Portland and was caught on tape. Having never seen footage of such an event, I couldn't say for sure what I see in that video. Does it flare up before it hits the ground? Does it look like a scene out of Michael Bay's Transformers to anyone else? Am I the only one that remembers the original series began with the alien robots crashing in Oregon? “I don't know why they wouldn't just tell us if it was aliens,” said my buddy, “We've seen plenty of movies; we could handle it.” I pointed out that uploading a virus to a mothership could easily be done with a ‘90s Mac laptop.

So in the same day, we've seen meteor footage, a satellite was shot down over the Pacific, and we had a full Lunar eclipse. It probably all adds up to absolutely nothing, but it's fun to observe and speculate nonetheless. And I’ll definitely be experimenting with more night shots now that I found some of those settings, so I can attack the next eclipse more fiercely.