Skip to main content

Blood moon super lunar eclipse 2015

Everyone knew about this lunar eclipse. The moon is at its perigee (closest approach to the Earth) and the Earth is getting in between the sun and the moon in such a way that it is completely blocking the sun from the moon. On any other total lunar eclipse, we can see the moon going completely dark and then reappearing slowly. This one on the other hand does not go dark at all. Instead, it turns blood red in color. The sun's rays graze the Earth's atmosphere and hit the moon when the moon is at its perigee. When the sun's rays graze the edge of the Earth's atmosphere, like it always happens during sunrise or sunset, the light turns very orange/red. So, on this lunar eclipse, the suns rays are bending through the edge of the Earth's atmosphere and hitting the moon and that's how the moon turns red.

I had too much excitement on this one. I built my brand new telescope last night so I could use it tonight. But, when the eclipse started, the moon was just above the horizon and behind clouds. So, I had to drive away from home to get to a secluded spot to actually see it. I made it to such a spot and tried to take a picture and then realized on the long exposure that there are wires hanging in the view.

So, I rushed back home as soon as the moon moved to a higher altitude and watched through the telescope. The clouds had cleared fairly well so I could take more pictures that were better than the first set.









Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Create #VirtualPrivateCloud, NAT Instance and NAT Gateways on @AWSCloud

Create a Virtual Private Cloud, NAT instance and the new NAT Gatweay ... and making it all work. This is a YouTube playlist of three videos.
Read more

Cheat sheet to create a #VPC and Subnets on @AWSCloud

One of the critical things to remember for working with a AWS VPC is creating and using it. I had hard time remembering how to do it, so, I wrote down a cheat sheet for myself.  If anyone wants to follow along, just navigate to the VPC page on the AWS Console and start with 'Create VPC' button. Please note that this may cost some dollars if you are not on the free tier. If you are on the free tier and make mistakes, it may cost some dollars. In the steps below, we will be creating the following on a new VPC: An internet gateway One public subnet with routes for accessibility from the internet One private subnet without any routes One EC2 web server with Apache installed in it and serving a sample html page - using the public subnet. One EC2 server with the private subnet and security group that allows access to resources running on the public subnet only.  Create VPC Name tag: myVPC CIDR Block: 10.0.0.0/16 Tenancy: default (Must have default. Otherwise, i...
Read more

SQL Server tables with JSON

We can indeed store json data as-is into a traditional Microsoft SQL Server database. The document hosted on Microsoft's site left a lot of questions and unknowns that I had to explore and experiment to figure out the right recipe for creating a table to store json, inserting the data as json and querying for the values of individual keys within the json. Here you go:  --Create a table with an identity column and a nvarchat(max) column to store the individual json documents create table dbo.logs (     _id bigint primary key identity,     json_log nvarchar(max) ); --Add a constraint to the json_log column of the table to ensure that the table accepts only json as value to store ALTER TABLE dbo.logs ADD CONSTRAINT [json_log record should be formatted as JSON] CHECK (ISJSON(json_log)=1); --Insert json into the table insert into dbo.logs values ('{"key": "value"}'); insert into dbo.logs values ('{"key": "value1"}'); --Query for al...
Read more