A dense fog rolled in a couple of nights ago. I grabbed my camera to get some fog shots, and as I panned around, I noticed a shimmering something up in the air, beneath the power lines. Zoomed in and found two huge spider webs, in unique circumstances for me – the higher one was about the shape and size of a kite, while the lower one was maybe the size of a bed sheet – mist from the fog coated the webs, and a nearby street light was just at the right angle for the moisture to catch the light, so I grabbed as many shots as I could before the sun came up. As it did, the webs became invisible once again, though if you knew where to look, you could see a speck in the middle, no doubt the architect of the artwork. I’ve not seen that from the wires before… though I shot the spider in “Spider Moon” right out the back door… now I wonder how many webs that size might be dangling from power & cable lines up high.
It was odd, eerie, interesting… for close to an hour, the sky dimmed slowly – then at totality, it got dark rather suddenly – enough that the street lights came on. An action cam I had set up on us to record the ambience captured the darkness, as did my trail cam, which switched to IR mode for the nearly 4 minutes of totality.
Flo wasn’t expecting to feel weird, emotionally – but, quite unexpectedly, became dizzy and nauseated, which lasted a while after the event. Migrating geese tend to stop-over here this time of year, and they went a bit nuts Monday, flying, flapping and honking as if they were quite disturbed; other birds made more noise than usual, and zipped around as if they were confused. Our cat Marcus, who likes to hang out with us outside, sat calmly on the front steps, bathing, as if nothing at all interesting was happening. Near where I stood, a swarm of ants appeared; they weren’t there just before the totality – I have no explanation for that.
For me, it was… pleasantly eerie. Jet contrails randomly criss-crossed the sky Monday, dozens more than are normal for here, but the sky was clear enough for the eclipse duration. It was much darker than I’d experienced at a partial eclipse years ago, and I have to agree that totality is more intense and odd-feeling than any partial. Some of that, of course, is just the novelty – if this routinely happened once a week, it wouldn’t be a big deal, I’m sure. Still, it does manage to tug at the emotions, on a primal level. A predictable glitch in the routine continuity of what we label as normal.
Photographically, I seem to have a bit of a theme going on
here. Years ago, for a magazine illustration, I photographed a coyote skull and
placed it in front of a full moon. Last summer, I captured a huge bat fluttering
across the Super Blue Moon. While at the computer a few years back, I heard Flo
shriek as she looked out the back door – a huge spider was spinning a web the
size of a bed sheet, between the gutter and the back porch – I photographed the
spider, then later added a full moon I’d snapped out front, to the image. Here's a 4-second video of a bat flying across the Super Blue Moon last August:
The last total solar eclipse viewable from Indianapolis took place in September of 1205, C.E., and totality then didn't completely cover what would someday be the entire city, as its original 1820 boundaries were later redefined by Unigov to encompass the majority of Marion County.
Pioneers once claimed that the forests here were so dense that a squirrel could hop tree-to-tree from the Ohio border to Illinois, without once having to set foot on Indiana soil. That might have made the viewing parties a bit trickier, back in 1205.
Click here for Flo's take on the eclipse:
If you might be interested in any of my moon photos, I'll be adding more products here:
At the beginning - Action Cam
(Click on the photo for a larger version)
While thinking about going to bed, I remembered it was a Super Blue Moon out, and decided to take a crack at it. The weather was quite comfortable, with a slight breeze, when I set up the tripod in our driveway. Still, at the extreme zoom necessary to get the shots that night, the slightest hint of a breeze caused a noticeable wobble on the camera’s screen, so I used the timer. I took a load of stills, and several times shot a minute or two of video. While keeping an eye on the screen, during one of the videos, I noticed something zip past the moon, and after I downloaded the files, located that particular video. I was delighted and rather surprised to see such a large bat zip across, reverse course and flutter to the top of the moon, then down in the direction it had come from, almost as if it was acting for an opening scene of a horror movie.
If I’d still been shooting stills, I’d have missed it. If I hadn’t been a bit lazy, I would have driven to a favorite spot away from city lights, where I’ve frequently done night photography, and once again, I would have missed that bat. Examining the videos from that night more closely, I noticed that the bat crisscrossed the moon several more times during my shoot, though none of them nearly so close.
My family moved to this neighborhood in ’62, and we’ve been at this address for more than 30 years – I’ve seen many bats flutter around the street lights, eating insects – but they’ve all been tiny, and I’ve not seen one that size at all, in Indiana.
All things considered, I was quite lucky to manage to capture that bat, at that time, at that angle, hamming it up for the camera.
