(Not so) darkside of the moon

I don’t half have some daft ideas sometimes…

We had been planning an evening of moon watching for sometime after we found out about the lunar perigee which took place on Saturday (19th March) but I went and thought that trying to stream the event would make it even more fun. The trouble was I thought of it around 11am on the day it was due to take place.
After a quick test I found that the place I normally have the laptop was a wifi blindspot as its out in the garden behind too many walls. Two feet to the right I could get a weak signal as it was a bit more line of sight to the router but still trying to get through a nice thick double glazed window and several feet of solid air.
Soooo a quick raid of the cellar turned up a bunch of old cat5’s and two switches which ended up being chained together, out a window and a power extension cord run out of the kitchen door. Good job it was dry.

Testing was put on hold when the daughter half inched the laptop to play club penguin for a bit but once she got fed up with feeding her puffles, it was time to test the setup. It only went and worked. There was plenty of brown tape to hold broken cabled into switches (you would have thought those little plastic clips would hold them better) and to hold the cables up around the house so noone tripped over them in the dark. Now we just had to wait until nightfall.

I started to spread the word via twitter and facebook but early indicators showed little interest (typical of you lot :p ) Setup started as it began to get dark with the garden table being used to hold the important gear for the night (peanuts both dry roast and salted) and the laptop while a collection of cables snaked their way around the garden.

Then the time I had been suggesting to begin arrived and there was no stinking moon. Moonrise was set for around 6:45 but at 7 there was still nothing! Too many houses blocked the rise so we waited, not very patiently but we waited until a faint glow started to slip above one of the houses… but it was still too low for the angle of the telescope. Minutes crept by while the glow crawled slowly up and up until *GASP* we managed to get something on the screen. It was some abuse from @zombiemedia moaning that nothing was going on. Well I had one viewer at least. The banter began a little with @JeffAllum pointing out the moon had arrived in his part of Ipswich. Bah!

It took its sweet time but the moon finally got its act together and started to come up and we even picked up a few more viewers. At one point I actually had seven people online at once (the software tells me how many but not where) and I know I had at least ten people including @craig3djarvis from the twitter crowd, a couple of facebookers and one of my daughters friends. Yeah at this point she had gone and phoned one of her friends to tell her to go and watch the video as it was streaming. We even put a message to her on the video feed a couple of times.

Had enough rambling? Time for some video?

Yeah I suppose so.

Moon video 1Moon video 2Moon video 3Moon video 4

The quality isn’t as good as previous video but i’m putting that down to streaming it on the night, plus its bloody hard to focus a telescope you can’t look through while freezing your fingers off and type on twitter at the same time (massaging my ego is more like it)

I tried last night (the night after the supermoon) to get something something else and while I got some more footage it doesn’t compare to the shock of finding and focusing on Saturn! My left eye has gazed upon Saturn and its rings. After getting Jupiter the other month this is just fantastic geekhood. I didn’t manage to film it due to roaming cloud and not being about to see anything other than a white blob on screen (I need to get a filter) so you will just have to take my word for it. I got this moon video though:
the second night
Thats cloud going the other way to the moons movement BTW.

Anyway, back to Saturday night. After a couple of hours hanging around in the backgarden the battery started to wobble and I was getting cold so we packed up. Thanks to those that visited while it was on and commented via the site or via twitter. It was actually a lot of fun to do and I’m wondering how/when I can do another. 🙂