It’s very still and freaky. Somehow freakier than when Hale Bopp graced the sky in 1997. It’s one thing to have an unusual visitor appear out of nowhere, but quite another for a standard fixture like the Moon to go all Twilight Zone on you! As unsettling as it is now, imagine what it was like hundreds or thousands of years ago for people who didn’t understand the science behind it.
I stepped outside to have a look. It was very cold and windy, and I was quite underdressed for the occasion. It’s a little weird seeing people out in the neighborhood staring at the sky at 2:30am. They were facing southwest, so I went around the block to catch the view by the river. Colder, windier, but there it was! Several clusters of random people gawking in parkas, not the usual crowd that gathers here. I would have stayed out longer had I not realized I’d have a perfect view from my office window!
So back inside, I grapped my camera to see if I could get any decent shots. This is the best I could come up with before the moon clouded over:
Lunar Eclipse — New York City, December 21, 2010
Shot with a Pentax *ist DS2 and a Vivitar 400mm f5.6 lens. Equivalent to 600mm with the 1.5x crop factor of the Pentax, that’s the full frame shot. Focus is a bit soft, partly my tripod isn’t up to steadying this massive lens, partly there’s a bit of haze in the sky, and possibly the lens is not focusing to infinity properly. I was in the process of steadying the camera in a chair instead when clouds rolled in and obscured the moon completely. Well, playtime’s over — I should really go to bed.
Scribbler Cat
I found Scribbler via this great post on Web Design Ledger. It’s a cool drawing tool that makes it look like you doodled intricately for hours during a boring lecture. I sketched this unhappy, wet cat in about a minute.
Seems like it would make a great tool to whip up ad hoc illustrations for a blog post. Or maybe really casual money?