In seven days, God willing, we will quietly celebrate my 81st birthday-still playing tennis three times a week, and riding my bike several miles on the other four, despite a bout with Stage 4 Non Hodgkin Lymphoma and a setback with root canal on a right side molar just yesterday. However, I am still crazily ambitious, so on October 8, just two days ago, I was on the roadway in front of our home on a very dark 5:00 am, with my remote tripod and hi def video camera set on the edge of the grass to video the highly publicized Blood Moon, with all the superstition surrounding it. I had seen full eclipses of the moon many times in my long lifetime, but I had never seen it through the lens of a camera. The one neighbor who passed in his car, obviously on his way to work at a very early hour, must have thought that I was nuts. But there I was! No matter, because I succeeded in videoing the entire eclipse from beginning to end. I was reluctant to do this because I knew that previous videoes of the moon were always too bright to really appreciate, like the recent Buck Moon. Thus, about two thirds through the filming, it dawned on me to utilize the infra-red capability of my trusty SONY hidef video camera. I was right! As the last 15 minutes of my video gives a beautiful picture of the moon, including the shadows of its numerous craters, although in shooting in infra-red, I lost what gives the name to this eclipse of the moon, the Blood Moon. Of course, one day later, after adding some background music to accompany the sounds of the early rising birds, I added the video to my ever growing collection of videos, now 175, which I have shot all over the world from North Carolina to China, and beyond. If even one person watches my video, I will feel that I have succeeded. This is the link to the video: youtube/watch?v=dWtEqqIgHms
Posted on: Fri, 10 Oct 2014 11:10:39 +0000