The Machinery of Night

Foto Friday: Through a Cloud Dumbly

I am totally cheating with this FF, because the photo was actually taken early Saturday. But I don't care.

Lunar Eclipse of December 10, 2011

I think it's not too bad, considering it was a hand-held shot, taken with the camera propped up vertically against a pillar. I love my camera, but it does have one huge nuisancey feature: there's a delay of a couple seconds between pressing the button and opening the shutter. This makes shooting in low light conditions...challenging.

Did I mention it was raining? The clouds would part, and I'd whip into position and zoom in. "All right, now! Now! Uh, where'd the moon go?" Back behind a cloud. (And it was really annoying that just a few degrees away, the cloud ended and Orion shone down as clear as crystal.)

I noticed the red star above the moon when I took the pictures, and thought it was pretty odd that the star was so red. Then when I looked at all the images, I saw that it was moving with respect to the moon. ZOMG! Aliens!

Either that or the red flashy light that allows the camera to focus bounced off a rain drop[*]. I tried to take a picture of Orion, and the red "star" was there, too. (And Orion was not. Too dark.) I like the aliens theory better.

Here's a gallery of pictures from people who didn't have to prop their cameras up against a post and shoot through the rain. Well, la-di-da.

[*] It bounces off the eyes of ginormous cane spiders, too. Creeeeepy

Labels: Foto Friday, Hawaii, Science