Thursday, February 21, 2008

Lunar Eclipse




In 6th grade Calvert School, we've been studying the solar system. A couple of days ago, the boys laid out this scale representation of the solar system. Note that the sun is the yellow ball back next to Ryan, and Pluto is the little blue ping pong ball closest to the camera. It's 600cm from the sun to Pluto, and Earth was only about 15cm away from the sun, so that's a huge distance. Now, I know that scientists declared Pluto not to be a planet any longer, but being an old fashioned girl, I have to continue to believe in Pluto as something other than a Disney dog. (And, yes, I know Pluto was originally a Roman god, but that's a rare useage of the name.)

Last night there was a lunar eclipse. It was truly spectacular in my front yard (aside from the fact that I damn near froze to death). It was 15 degrees outside, and very few clouds. Ryan went out and found the moon at about 8:30, then we started journeying outside every 10 minutes until about midnight. I have a great shot of the moon about 30 minutes into the eclipse, and one that's blurred at the peak of it. It truly was a deep reddish orange, and I'm sad that I couldn't get a better picture. But, for anyone who missed it (or cares even vaguely), here's a little bit of the lunar eclipse:

2 comments:

Mimi said...

Talk about timing--that eclipse was a n excellent visual! I'm sure you still remember the Little Dipper in the Calvert's K program. Well, we're just about to do that tomorrow, and the weather report says we're going to have cloudy nights the rest of the week. Seems we'll have to visit the planetarium instead...
P.S. I LURVE beef stroganoff!

pam said...

Marjie, great photos! That's the beauty of homeschooling, you can stay up to watch an eclipse! Since I have to get up at 5:45am, I was in bed before it became impressive!