Zooming the Moon at Night, Testing out my camera

So I looked out my window the other night and noticed a pair of red blinking lights moving erratically side to side coming towards my house, I thought this is it, a UFO sighting. So I rushed and grabbed my camera, hoofed it outside and noticed the sound, it was just a plane, but it was still moving strangely. I don't know what was causing the the plane to appear to be moving oddly, but it sure didn't look like a plane, maybe it was the clouds interfering some how.

Then I noticed the moon, so I thought I'm outside already, may as well film the moon. I took two videos that night, the one below and a second one I still have to upload. In the second one I captured a plane, and it sure does look like a lot of UFO videos shot at night seen on Youtube.

Not the best quality, to bright, but I forgot to adjust the white balance, so next time I film the moon hopefully it'll be full of moonly detail.

Sky Watching with Rand No.2

Here's some more plane videos for everyone, I titled it differently than the first video because it's more inclusive and flows better. These clips are some of my first attempts at filming objects in the sky, they're pretty shaky, but trust me I do get better.

So far it's been an enjoyable experience and I'm well on my way to having a rock steady camera hand and I've realized a few things about UFO videos on the way, they're probably ten times as hard to capture on video.

Plane Spotting with Rand

Not all that interesting, the font doesn't suit the footage and there's a lot more to come, how's that for a riveting introduction.

I've found that filming moving objects in the sky is actually very tricky, so I've been practicing on planes, luckily there's no shortage of planes flying over head where I live and probably not so lucky for you guys I'm up to about 2 dozen videos like the one below, but I promise you they do get better and you'll see the practice paying off.

So join me in enjoying (meh) Plane Spotting with Rand.


Remember to head over to youtube to enjoy it in HD.

Zooming the Moon

To me it always seems like the moon is cheating the sun out of something when it comes out during the day, you never get people saying hey, look the suns out but you get that with the moon, then again if you look at the sun the wrong way you may go blind.

I was just testing out my camera in the video below which only has 12x optical zoom, but goes up to something like 150x digital, which when used creates a lot of noise. Some of the lower end cameras I was looking at have far greater zoom capabilities, but what you gained with that you lost in video quality.

My video isn't all that interesting, but I love the way the clouds start to roll on through when I'm zooming out near the end.
Watch in HD

Testing out my camera on a Tree Weta

I think this is a tree Weta, a big as insect only found in New Zealand, this is the biggest one I've seen, just a little longer than my middle finger, but the giant Cave Weta should dwarf this gal, pretty sure this is a female to.

I was out on my deck with my new camera, saw it and filmed it. Converting the resulting High-def video file to something youtube could use was a pain in the behind, but I think it came out o.k.

You can also watch the video in HD by heading over to youtube.