Anyone else impressed with last night’s lunar eclipse?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Yes, the moon’s eclipse was perfectly timed to coincide with Hillary’s eclipse by her adversay. How did they manage that?
I missed it.
Hey, maybe it’s the eclipse setting up a bad omen for McCain.
The NYT piece aside, TPM has a must read. seems with that bank loan, McCain boxed himself in to public financing:
not so fast says FEC
I have a post I wrote on Sat. about that. I haven’t posted it yet because I’m not hep on campaign finance laws, but considering the debt he has now, it does seem to me that he’s locked into the only using public financing. The point of my post is that it looks to me that he is fully aware of this, no matter how much his campaign denies it. That explains why he started hitting Obama on the public financing thing out of the blue. Since there was no pledge between them, it was certainly random for his campaign to take statements from their two different and separate interviews and pretend it was a pledge.
I was happy to see the eclipse last night. I posted on my blog some photos and this:
My little girl loved it. We had an unobstructed view from our kitchen window and she kept running over to look. Right when the shadow has fully covered the moon, the clouds rolled and the moon completely disappeared. She lost it, and kept yelling, “The moon is gone! ‘Laws yes! M-O-O-N spells moon!’.”
Very cool! Beautiful picture! Just like what I saw!!
I texted a few friends re this as it was happening. One wrote me back, “thanks for the heads up, literally!” 😉
I was all excited and the moon was huge when it came up but by 10p the sky had clouded over. I did see one once before and it was awesome. There were very high, thin clouds and the result was lunar rainbows (there’s an actual word for these but I can’t remember it right now), very eery green, purple arcs in the sky like comas around a dark blood red moon.
But nothing in sky watching compares to a solar eclipse. Lunar eclipses are just fey by comparison.
Moonbows.
Little kids are wonderful. I took my two grandkids out to see the eclipse last night, armed with a pair of binoculars. The three-year-old wasn’t particularly impressed and was more interested in wandering around the back yard and collecting rocks she was sure Grandma would think were pretty. The six-year-old thought it was pretty cool, and I got to give him a basic astronomy lesson by using my, his, and his sister’s fists to show how the Earth casts a shadow on the Moon during an eclipse. He then took the binoculars, looked at the Moon for a while, and then went looking around the rest of the sky and announced that he could see Tie fighters and X-wings and a “cracked planet.”
My husband is an astronomy geek and since the little girl was about 2, he’s been showing her the skies. Lately, she’s been doing the same thing with the Star Wars. Usually, she’ll go, “Oh, look Jupiter is getting big.” Last night, there were two stars near the moon and she asked with a straight face, “Which one is Alderaan and which one is Tatooine?”
A couple years ago we took our granddaughter, who was about 8 at the time, to the planetarium at the Pacific Science Center to see the star show. I don’t remember the rest of it, but they talked about the constellation Orion, and how the name for the star Betelgeuse came from a couple of Arabic words meaning something like “armpit of the great one” (because it’s located where the hunter’s right armpit would be). She thought that was the funniest thing she’d ever heard. For weeks after my daughter would ask her “What does Betelgeuse mean?” and she’d point to her armpit and shout, “Armpit Star!!”
LOL at that!!!
Oh, that’s both cute and sad! I am thinking of that stupid Americans video where someone thought Star Wars was based on a true story!
the best part for me about the eclipse was the way the earth’s shadow gives the moon actual substance and shape.
In ordinary conditions, it’s hard to discern that it’s a three-dimensional object: it just looks like a flat white circle or flat crescent shape. The shadow really emphasized the Moon’s sphere, and that was really cool.
I missed it too, but I was in on the meteor that came down on Tues am. Whole valley lit up, full moon, not a cloud in the sky, was really eerie, you could see its reflection on the river basin. Thankfully no FEMA trailers were dispatched.
http://www.leadertelegram.com/story-news.asp?id=BFRH7S6LAPR
back on feb 13, BushCo™ announced it was shutting down the publicly accessible Economiclndicators.gov site for “budgetary reasons”.
well, due to pressure, from users, the netroots and others, they’ve had a change of heart:
so you’ll be able to continue to get the govt’s info as you watch the economy circling the drain.
Asks Clinton to step aside. A h/t to Baratunde at goodCRIMETHINK (x-posted to Jack and Jill Politics), he received a letter from Paul Newell and urged to post it. Part of the letter reads:
Looks like Newell is looking for some longer coattails for his race.
no it was cloudy here, we had to have it imported on the television from St. Louis..
George Clooney on his Oscar chances:
Source
Didn’t I see some postings about the cocaine planes here.
Don’t know about madcow website, but here it is anyway:
http://www.madcowprod.com/02072008.html
didn’t get to see the moon eaten, had sleet & freezing rain instead.