Tuesday, December 21, 2010

~ Winter Solstice & total lunar eclipse on full moon ~ Blogger takes a break ~


A full lunar eclipse took place last night in many northern locations (Dec. 20th or 21st depending on time zones). It was too cloudy here (at least at my house) to watch it due to a large and persistent winter rain storm across all the islands. This was a special eclipse: first full one seen on Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere in 372 years and the next one will be December 21st, 2485.

I am taking some time off from my usual passions of lava and blogging. I will check in from time to time in the next couple of weeks, but will likely not have many lava updates. So, besides the USGS/HVO’s daily eruptive reports, you can always talk directly with Janguard personnel who are managing the Hawaii County Lava Viewing site. Phone after 2:00 PM up until 9:30 PM seven days a week at 430-1966 or 217-2215. Tom or Steve will give you a pretty good update on the coastal lava flow situation.

What an active lava year it was!

I was going to put together a Year-In-Review for the lava flow but realized there were so many remarkable events it made that task become daunting… So… I will suggest that you take some time in the next few days to browse back through these blog posts: try peaking at December 2009 to see what was happing then, Maybe click on each month of 2010 in the Blog Archive found on the far right further down the page. By clicking on a month you can scroll down through some of that months activities, and also select show older posts to quickly scroll down and review an entire months posting at one time; the images themselves often tell the story ;)

Mauna Kea: We have been getting some new snowfalls up on the two monster volcanoes. Mauna Kea Weather Center has a nice selection of cams and they can be viewed in time-lapse day-into-night—Sometimes very cool to watch. I like the Gemini cam view/ here is a sample of one of the time-lapse clips of that cam from December 14th

~~~~ Aloha,
Leigh

~~~~~~~~~~~ The last total lunar eclipse I saw here was August 27th, 2007 at midnight: Here are the images I took of the event:Exact total eclipse and a few stars

CURRENT MOON

3 comments:

  1. Leigh,
    thanks for your wonderful coverage of the lava flows and photos of the celestial bodies. I remember that 2007 eclipse-we viewed it from Kehena and it was a beauty. Lat night we watched the eclipse here on the Olympic Peninsula and had a good view. Enjoy your Holiday Season.
    Mike DeMarco

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  2. mele kalikimaka. enjoy your down time, i'll miss your posts. Mahalo for your hard work.

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  3. A fine solstice it was. Indeed. Very pagan of you. Not that there is anything wrong with that. Good will to men and women.

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