The Sweeping Shadow, Australia, November 14

The Sweeping Shadow - Total Solar Eclipse, Nov 14 2012,The Granite, FNQ, Australia. from Colin Legg on Vimeo.

I was fortunate to view the eclipse from "The Granite' in far north Queensland this November. Inspired by Joe Cali's short but spectacular footage of the 2008 event (https://vimeo.com/51646602), I sought a high vantage point to capture the sweep of the shadow. Clear views north and east proved difficult to find, so I had to hike an 850m peak the night before and sleep on a rock ledge.

The clip includes 3 timelapses at various focal lengths. The first used a constant exposure, while the latter 2 tracked the light in the final 2 minutes either side of C2/C3, using bulb scripting. Eclipse Orchestrator software managed the light curve, while the cameras were triggered by a custom microcontroller built by Thomas Bethel. Many thanks to Fred Bruenjes and Thomas Bethel.

You can find out more about my eclipse experience here: https://www.facebook.com/ColinLeggPhotography

- Colin Legg
Astronomy Picture of the Day
December 10, 2012

Another incredible demonstration of the apex foci of the Moon's umbra shadow, subtending a cone 1700 km-wide at the lunar limb, stretching 362,000 km and arriving at a point miraculously near the surface of Earth, where it is barely 80 km across.

New LRO videos honor 1000 days in lunar orbit

Nancy Neal Jones

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

In honor of 1,000 days in orbit, the NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) team at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt Md. has released two new videos.

One video takes viewers through the moon's evolutionary history, and reveals how it came to appear the way it does today. Another video gives viewers a guided tour of prominent locations on the moon's surface, compiled by the spacecraft's observations of the moon.

Still from "Evolution of the Moon"

"Evolution of the Moon" explains why the moon did not always look like it does now. The moon likely started as a giant ball of magma formed from the remains of a collision by a Mars sized object with the Earth about four and a half billion years ago. After the magma cooled, the moon's crust formed. Then between 4.5 and 4.3 billion years ago, a giant object hit near the moon's South Pole, forming the South Pole-Aitken Basin, one of the two largest proven impact basins in the solar system. This marked the beginning of collisions that would cause large scale changes to the moon's surface, such as the formation of large basins.

Because the moon had not entirely cooled on the inside, magma began to seep through cracks caused by impacts. Around one billion years ago, it's thought that volcanic activity ended on the near side of the moon as the last of the large impacts made their mark on the surface. The moon continued to be battered by smaller impacts. Some of the best-known impacts from this period include the Tycho, Copernicus, and Aristarchus craters. So, while the moon today may seem to be an unchanging world, its appearance is the result of billions of years of violent activity.

The two-and-a-half minute video is available for viewing and downloading at: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?10930

Shackleton and its permanently shadowed interior, "twice as deep as the Grand Canyon," from "Tour of the Moon"

"Tour of the Moon" takes viewers to several interesting locations on the moon. Tour stops included in this breathtaking journey across the moon's surface are: Orientale Basin, Shackleton crater, South Pole-Aitken Basin, Tycho crater, Aristarchus Plateau, Mare Serenitatis, Compton-Belkovich volcano, Jackson crater and Tsiolkovsky crater. The fully narrated video, as well as clips from each of the stops on the tour, are available to everyone in formats viewable on virtually any device.

To view the whole tour; go to: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?10929

iPad owners are also encouraged to download the NASA Viz app to see this and other NASA science stories updated twice a week. The story featuring Evolution of the Moon will be available Thursday, March 15.

To download the app, go to: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/nasaviz/index.html

LRO launched aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on June 18, 2009. LRO is managed by NASA Goddard for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

YouTube Video of the NASA Press Conference, "A New Moon"

In the hours immediately after the press conference at NASA HQ in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 24, announcing confirmation by three missions of a new and more widespread lunar hydrology, Lunar Pioneer posted the tale tell slides presented, with contextual commentary below. Nevertheless, it's likely readers may have missed the event itself, which was worth the viewing.

Google-Partner Blog Discovery Enterprise was kind enough to post the YouTube clips of the event, in three parts, which can now been watched, HERE.