Time Lapse of Lunar Eclipse

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Posted by michael on Saturday October 30, 2004 @10:00PM from the shadows-linger dept.

MufasaZX writes "Start with a relatively rare occurrence, the complete lunar eclipse from last Wednesday. Next add the amazingly rare, a perfectly clear fog free night in San Francisco, as viewed from the cliffs overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. Then I set up my trusty Sony MiniDV camcorder and wide angle lens on a tripod and proceeded to freeze my butt off for 2 hours. Dump the video into Premier, accelerate it 200x to just 37 seconds, and the resulting video is IMHO simply stunning. Until my web server gets crushed you can download it here, but after that please use your Gnutella client of choice and search for LunarEclipse-10-2004.wmv."

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cross-platform, please? by kanweg · 2004-10-30 22:04 · Score: 5, Insightful

an mpeg version is appreciated.

Bert
1. Re:cross-platform, please? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-30 23:35 · Score: 1, Insightful
  
  Yeah? Well try playing it on non-x86 then. I don't know of any non-microsoft, or for that matter, non-binary, decoder that supports WMV3.
2. Re:cross-platform, please? by ajs · 2004-10-31 03:02 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  I'm running the pre-release 5 for 1.0 with all of the codecs that were provided. I don't think I want to go CVS just to view this one file. Perhaps the guy who made it in the first place could just save it in a different format.
  
  It's amazing how similar trying to view videos from a Windows system is to trying to view Word documents... you'd think it was the same monopoly trying to break standards in yet another field... oh wait...
To all those complaining about speed by Smerity · 2004-10-30 22:17 · Score: 3, Insightful

Really, 1 Kbps is not that bad considering it's only a 4 meg file, pretend you're on 56k, or hell, just go outside!
You've got other things to do than read Slashdot... Right? *cough cough*
Wide Angle Lens - DOH! by tcpaulh · 2004-10-30 23:01 · Score: 2, Insightful

Totally Lame. What's the point of shoting a lunar eclipse at wide angle?
Re:Here's a torrent by jerde · 2004-10-30 23:03 · Score: 2, Insightful

Simply amazing. 100 seconds after posting, the first people started grabbing the torrent. Now 20 minutes later it's fully seeded by dozens of people. Gosh, I love bittorrent.

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INsigNIFICANT
Re:The moon is a myth! by metlin · 2004-10-30 23:08 · Score: 1, Insightful

No, because it's cold in outer space.

Tsk, tsk.
lame! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-30 23:12 · Score: 1, Insightful

What a waste of bandwidth. Huge video file and it looks like someone pulled a tarp off a streetlight ten blocks away. This is best the Slashdot editors could find in the slush pile?
Waste of time by OldManAndTheC++ · 2004-10-30 23:18 · Score: 2, Insightful

Downloaded and watched it. Blurry, indistinct and uninteresting. A complete waste of time. Which of course makes it perfectly appropriate for Slashdot :)

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Soylent Green is peoplicious!
Good concept! by Shag · 2004-10-30 23:23 · Score: 3, Insightful

Kinda need more zoom (500mm is good for most kinds of eclipses, I think), though. A nice telescope with a guider on it would work wonders for this sort of thing.
Another timelapse of the same eclipse, from 2400 miles WSW of San Francisco, is at http://www.astroday.net/LunarEclipse.html in QuickTime format... I hope my friend doesn't mind the slashdotting. Still not much in the way of telephoto or zoom, but nifty cloud patterns and stuff.

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Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Not worth it. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-30 23:51 · Score: 1, Insightful

The video is just a point of light moving across the sky. You can't even tell it's an eclipse, it just starts out dark and gets brighter. Seems they didn't even capture the whole eclipse. And I don't see those planes someone said they could see taking off. Video doesn't even have it's levels set properly. Skip it.
Re:wmv by v1 · 2004-10-31 02:11 · Score: 3, Insightful

WMV3 codec is M$ proprietary, and is ONLY found in the Windows Media Player FOR WINDOWS. Not even the Macintosh release of WMP has this codec. You can also forget VLC, Mplayer, QuickTime, and any other player for that matter. WMP for Windows ONLY.

It never ceases to amaze me how many ppl post videos encoded with this codec, because there are so many ppl out there that have absolutely NO way to view it.

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I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Re:Wide angle lens? by elgatozorbas · 2004-10-31 02:32 · Score: 4, Insightful

It would have been much better if he'd used a zoom lens, unless I'm missing something?

While I agree that the movie could have been better, there is a simple explanation for the lens used (apart from the fact that it may have been the only one available): using a zoom lens would require you to move the camera. While this is a burden to do at night (instead of just letting the camera run on its own), it would also be far from trivial to follow a smooth curve, especially when you don't know exactly where the moon is going. In other words, a zoom lens would have resulted in a very sharp, but very shaky movie. The guy gave it a good shot, next time may be better...

Z
Re:Hmm not that impressive. by Solder+Fumes · 2004-10-31 04:25 · Score: 2, Insightful

That's 100 times better than the stupid video. Great job!
Re:Hmm not that impressive. by l810c · 2004-10-31 06:29 · Score: 2, Insightful

Infinately cooler than the video. And it doesn't even move. How many gigs of bandwidth were wasted on the video?