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Time Lapse of Lunar Eclipse
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."
an mpeg version is appreciated.
Bert
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