Eclipsing Sutro

I got up ridiculously early on a cold Saturday morning — 5:15 AM and 42ºF to be precise — and climbed Bernal. Why? To see the eclipse. The erstwhile @datapointed used SCIENCE AND MATH to determine that the masked moon would pass immediately behind Sutro as seen from Bernal. (Damn you science! Do you not realize how little coffee is available at 5:15AM?)

Anyway, here are a couple of quick shots before I start writing too much.

People watching the eclipse atop Bernal:

I was hoping to get a timelapse of the eclipsed moon settling behind Sutro but that was not meant to be — the software was willing but the hardware was weak. Here are a couple of my efforts, but @jobius did a much better job (from the comfort of his house, no less. Smart man.)

Thankfully I got some decent shots of the moon passing behind Sutro using 15 second exposures on my Lumix. Here’s a still:

The sun was starting to rise at this point, and the moon was battling not only more atmosphere, but a foggy haze and grew increasingly hard to see.

Here are 9 images turned into a movie (sorry for the crappy alignment but video editing software is my nemesis):

Here’s the Tumblr link in case Vimeo barfs, and of course an animated GIF:

Note that ancient peoples would find the bit depth extremely impressive.

And in a final bit of meta-photography, here is video of the eclipse from ABC 7’s camera FROM ATOP SUTRO TOWER.

That is all.