virus, sermon, lunar eclipse

This month’s “#blogboost” challenge begins a few days late for me because I have been looking after some details to make this site more secure for my visitors. I have taken some time to add protection to the files and to make it more difficult for autobots to mess things up.

I hope the changes do not spoil your experience and deter you from leaving comments.

Without preaching too much about the vulnerability of blogs and websites, let me simply say, use protection on your web site. Remember life jackets and condoms only work if you wear them.

So that was the segue from the virus to the sermon.

I recall a discussion with a pastor about why sermons were so long. Could they be shorter? He replied that he tried to touch on four different topics to catch the attention of more people and give them something to remember. Sometimes it would be the previous day’s baseball game. With that in mind I decided to add a couple of unrelated topics to this post to fill in the space and find something of interest for my friends who take the time to read it.

Pictures are always good. And how about a youtube video. Here is the picture:

Lunar Eclipse 2015
Lunar Eclipse 2015

 

The picture is one of eight that I took as the moon was moving into the shadow of the earth. I took them about three minutes apart. I had not spent a lot of time getting prepared for this sequence of pictures. I scrambled to get the tripod, and the zoom lens,  and the screen off of the window. I stopped when the moon was almost completely shadowed and the clouds rolled in. That was between 10:00 and 10:20 PM EST.

10:13 EST
10:13 EST

The technical numbers are: Canon 650D camera , ISO 1600, 300mm telephoto lens, f5.6. The exposure time was different for each of the pictures, less for the brighter moon, and longer for the darker moon. They ranged from 1/8 second, through 1/4 second, to as long as 1/2 second.

That was the easy part. The moon was only a small part of the picture, and was in a different part of the frame for each picture. So I used photoshop and its windows equivalents  to clip out only the part with the moon, position it in about the same place in each frame, and to stitch them together into a video with some background music. Here is the result.

the youtube video:   https://youtu.be/HlX3j8kUyPw

Where do you want to go today?

Thanks for looking at the pictures. Tell me what you liked, or didn't.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.