Okay, this isn't even vaguely related to the Pipsqueak (or even adoption in general), but I wanted to share a few photos with y'all.
If I get the words in the right order, on the night of January 20-21 we experienced a Super Blood Wolf Moon Eclipse. (Complete with a
meteor strike on the moon smack-dab in the middle of things!) Crazy person that I am, I decided to try to photograph the eclipse much like what
I did the last time we had a good lunar eclipse visible from my stompin' grounds.
The difference is that the last time this happened, it was a cold night. The weather this time 'round made that last eclipse adventure feel positively balmy... and that was before I factored in the vicious wind chill. I live in an end-unit townhouse, so I had to shoot from directly in front of my house -- otherwise I would've been directly in line with the wind tunnel between my house & the next block of townhouses, where it would be far too cold to stand (plus the wind there was so strong, it stood a good chance of blowing over my tripod... and possibly me as well).
I poked my head out a few times and kept muttering, "Nope, still bright white... Nope, still full..." until I finally noticed a tiny little itty-bitty bit of darkness encroaching on one corner of the moon. I grabbed a shopping bag with some rocks to weigh down the tripod, bundled myself up, set up outside, and promptly overexposed the image by about a mile....
Okay, that didn't go so well... lemmesee... I changed to a different program on my camera, and got this image at 10:58pm:
A bit of backstory: I knew I'd have to usie maximum zoom on my camera plus slow shutter speeds, which meant about a 99% possibility of motion blur (especially with the occasional gust of wind whipping around the corner of the house). There's a lot more than a "tiny little itty-bitty bit of darkness encroaching on the moon" in this shot because I took a bunch of pix before it, but this was the first that didn't include massive motion blur. You'll see this problem pop up in some of my other shots, despite my best efforts (and about 3lbs of rocks hanging from the tripod to steady it). Sorry!
Oh, yeah -- I have an app on my iPhone that connects to the camera via WiFi so I can trigger the shutter without adding the vibration from my hand physically pressing the buttons. I've used it before, so I figured it would be the perfect solution this time around... but it would. NOT. connect. no matter what I did or how loudly I cussed, so my physically pushing buttons on the camera also added to the motion blur. (
Dude, at least you tried...)
Anyhoo, this began a couple of hours of my wrestling the camera, tripod, and bag of rocks out my front door, down the steps to the sidewalk, setting up in as sheltered a spot as possible without having something block my view of the moon, shooting several pictures with different settings until my fingers were too cold to feel the buttons on the camera and/or the camera was showing signs of freezing, then wrestling everything back indoors until I could feel my hands again. (It got so bad that I microwaved a mug of water so I'd have something warm to hold onto.) Here are some of the results:
 |
| 23:11hrs 2019_01_20 |
 |
| 23:16hrs 2019_01_20 |
 |
| 23:30hrs 2019_01_20 |
 |
| 23:38hrs 2019_01_20 |
 |
| 23:48hrs 2019_01_20 |
 |
| 23:53hrs 2019_01_20 |
 |
| 00:20hrs 2019_01_21 |
 |
| 00:39hrs 2019_01_21 |
 |
| 00:57hrs 2019_01_21 |
 |
| 00:58hrs 2019_01_21 |
 |
| 00:58hrs 2019_01_21 (different program on camera) |
As the moon began to emerge from the Earth's shadow, two things happened: I began to have problems finding settings that would not grossly over- or under-expose the image, and the moon's movement through the sky had forced me closer & closer to where the wind came blasting through the gap between my house & the next -- making it a
lot more difficult to avoid camera shake (not to mention making it even more difficult than that to avoid freezing my fingers.) I managed to get two more usable shots before the cold, the wind, and the encroachment of house & trees on my line of sight forced me to stop:
 |
| 01:00hrs 2019_01_21 |
 |
| 01:25hrs 2019_01_21 |
There are a couple of gaps in the time between photos because I either didn't get any good pictures or because I got involved with trying to make the
fakakte iPhone app to link to the camera (to no avail). And I apologize for the difference in size & position of the moon in the various photos; it turns out that the Mac version of GIMP does
not have some of the capabilities of Photoshop (or requires 27 steps to accomplish what Photoshop does in 3), so I couldn't quite get all the images lined up & the same size (remember, the moon was moving plus I had to keep moving the tripod).
So there you have it... I can't claim any astronomy-quality (or even semi-pro photographer quality) pictures of the recent superduperbloodywolfy eclipse, but I wanted to share what I did manage to get with y'all.
More Pipsqueak-related posts coming soon!
