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Time Lapse of Lunar Eclipse

Posted by michael on 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."

5 of 286 comments (clear)

  1. cross-platform, please? by kanweg · · Score: 5, Insightful

    an mpeg version is appreciated.

    Bert

  2. To all those complaining about speed by Smerity · · 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*

  3. Good concept! by Shag · · 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.

    --
    Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
  4. Re:wmv by v1 · · 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.

    --
    I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
  5. Re:Wide angle lens? by elgatozorbas · · 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