Total lunar eclipse

Cool, huh?

UPDATE:
It was raining something fierce the day before and most of today was wet and cloudy (bad enough to turn off the electricity* at upscale Ala Moana Shopping Center), but we saw a few glimpses of open sky in Honolulu, so we went with the original plan to head out to Sandy Beach (about ten miles east of the city, toward the eastern edge of Oahu), where the city lights are very faint and it's a nice place to view any full moon.

When we got to Sandy Beach, we couldn't see anything, hence the picture above. We wuz robbed, I thought, since we got none of the red moon they had talked about in the papers. In fact, when we arrived at just after 10 p.m., in the middle of the full eclipse, we couldn't see the moon at all, though we didn't know if it was because of cloud cover or that's just the way the lunar eclipse is supposed to work. When a sliver of the moon finally showed up, it was it's usual white color, but with an obvious dark shadow over it.

AP got a better photo than I did (my partial solar eclipse camera work was more impressive). What you see above is pretty much what we saw at one point, though the moving clouds obscured our view half the time.

Still, it's not the reddish moon I was anticipating. While I wasn't expecting a biblical moon turned to blood from Revelations 6:12, I thought it would be the red-orangeish color I've seen in California where a full moon just over the horizon sometimes has a light rusty tint due to impurities in the air (e.g., light smog).

* The Honolulu Star-Advertiser says that the power outage was due to Hawaiian Electric Co (HECO) "substation fire," which was itself "apparently caused by the heavy rains." When there's no lightning to speak of, I find it quite comical that heavy rain is causing fires.

Another half-assed eclipse

Another solar eclipse is coming. That's a good time to pull out the picture that I took of last year's partial eclipse that struck terror in the hearts of people across Asia, including Seoul, where I took this picture above.

I protected my eyes and my digital SLR's photocells by taking a white plastic bag and folding it several times and covering the lens so that just enough light would get through to see the outline of the moon over the sun (I had to experiment with the number of folds several times, a process that nearly blinded me).

And below is NASA's picture of the same event. Sure, it's crisper and the colors are probably truer, but mine was hella cheaper, I'll tell you what.



And this is Pacman.

A total partial eclipse of the heart Hub

Arvinsign complains that all the icky weather on the peninsula lately may mean that he'll miss the partial solar eclipse that is to arrive on Friday evening at 7:18 p.m. The eclipse will be at its maximum at 7:37, three minutes before sunset, when 27% of the sun will be blocked.

Look on the bright side, Arv: Looking at solar eclipses is one of two things that can make you go blind if you do it too often.

[above: Every few years, ancient peoples in the Japanese archipelago, lacking a full understanding of astronomy, were terrified to witness the deity Pakkuman crossing the sky. To stave off the horror, they would try to throw fruit in its path, lest it come down to earth and devour the virgins or the town, or at least the least skanky of the villagers. Giant gold balls positioned in front of him were thought to give the celestial being the power to vanquish ghosts that had been plaguing the town. Millennia later, men from Ōta, Japan, would harness this legend, developing a popular video game. Okay, I frankly don't know where the hell I'm going with this, so I'll just stop now.]