I've seen a lot of lunar eclipses, and they are usually really lovely (as the pictures I've been posting attest to), but they're very slow, lasting for hours. It's fun to look for a minute, go do something else for a few, then look again and see how the lighting on the Moon has changed. You don't really get a sense of motion, just change over time. But what if you could smoothly speed it up? What would it look like then? Magic.
[embed width="610"]http://vimeo.com/25808333[/embed]
was taken by Jean-Luc Dauvergne in Tajikstan (as an aside, the capitol city of Dushanbe is my hometown Boulder's sister city). It spans 5 hours, and you can see just how the very bright full Moon plunges into darkness as it enters the shadow of the Earth. As I pointed out in an earlier post
, the Moon was near the ...