Holiday!

It’s finally here. Three glorious weeks of not having an alarm meep at me every morning. Three weeks to do absolutely nothing ¹, to lie in bed as long as I want ², to watch endless zombie movies ³⁴, and let my body atrophy ⁵ while blowing my next pay (coming soon) on many bags of Maltesers and those little sherbet filled flying saucer things ⁶.

You’re probably not interested but, my God it’s been a long time coming…

Of course, I’m also looking out at the first cloudy evening in weeks. It’s usually upper 20s and clear. Today? Cooler (at last!) and wall to wall cloud. Since the best lunar eclipse of my lifetime is going to take place in a few hours, what’s the betting it’ll be a clear sky again tomorrow? Hmm…

¹ Since it’s either been ridiculous rain or ridiculous sun, the hundreds thousands of square metres of grass have turned into a jungle. Guess who will be having to mow that lot. With a little walk-behind mower, nothing fancy like a ride-on or tractor-slasher.

² Something about grass…

³ I watched yesterday on Prime a film called “Punk Fu Zombie”. Take it from me, it’s really bad. We (you and I) could get together and take a p!ss out of zombie flicks and improvise the whole thing and film it on a mobile phone and it would be better. The only reason I persisted with this deplorable excuse of a movie was because it was filmed in Québec, and I was quite fascinated with their accent. It’s really different to provincial French, to the point where I can say that I pretty much only understood the gratuitous English that was (frequently!) thrown in.

⁴ Something about monocotyledons, maybe?

⁵ Are you there Poaceae? It’s me, Rick.

⁶ Yum-yum-yum-yum-yum-yum-yum-yum…

Since the best lunar eclipse of my lifetime is going to take place in a few hours

It’s going on right now. We have British Standard Eclipse-Watching Weather – thick cloud.

The clouds broke in the west after drenching me when I went to feed outdoor cat. I’m not sure which one of us was more miffed by that sudden downpour.
Unfortunately the Mayenne (the river, not the town or the departement) is quite a magnet for thunderstorms. One is brewing the length of the river that I can see. While it’s pretty far away, it has wiped out everything from south-south-east to north-east with thick ominous clouds. Well, it’ll be worse in Laval, I’m sure they’re going to get it in an hour or two…like usual.

But, it wasn’t a complete boo, I got to see Jupiter’s moons for the first time. Actually, I lie. My eyes never really saw them, but my phone did … it’s an S7 with a special camera element that dumps ever increasing resolution in favour of larger image elements, which means it is pretty awesome in low light photography (some night photo tests, and some more); it made slightly noisy but otherwise acceptable shots using the standard automatic settings and a shutter speed something like 1/30 (a moonlit long (10sec) exposure comes out looking like it was taken in daylight, until you notice the stars!).
I looked though the eyepiece with my eye and only just (barely) made out the moons. So win for my phone.

It was all greatly aided by a clip on bracket that I got from Amazon (yay Prime, I ordered it Sunday afternoon, it was dispatched Sunday evening (!) and arrived here Monday lunchtime). The bracket clips around the eyepiece and holds the phone in place over it. There are issues, as you can expect from having a phone’s camera over a telescope eyepiece – namely it’s a round circle in the centre of the screen – but most of that can be glossed over by zooming in, or cropping in post-production. Certainly, it is ridiculously difficult to hold a camera to the eyepiece manually, while ensuring the placement and focus given one tap can knock it all off kilter. The earlier picture I got of Saturn was pure fluke and many many attempts!

Here’s a quick video I made on my first try earlier in the week: https://youtu.be/8Jb3xdLsxaM