there was a lunar eclipse last night. turns out i had a great view from the attic so i set up the time lapse camera to film it. due to the earth's rotation the moon would creep up & to the right until it left the frame every 5-10 minutes; sometimes the camera would compensate by automatically zooming out. other times i would check on the shot & it would be solid black. i also got some interesting auto-focus effects from the camera trying to focus on a single, distant light source in the middle of a dark sky. with 1/4sec footage taken every minute i got at most a couple minutes footage overall, but it was a worthwhile experiment, an opportunity that doesn't come all that often.

i also watched both harry potter movies yesterday. i turned on the tv around 11 in the morning; it just happened to be tuned to HBOW & the first movie was coincidentally starting... so i watched for a few minutes & pretty soon i was drawn in. after the 1st movie ended i realized why they were showing it: because the 2nd movie was scheduled for its pay-cable premiere later in the evening. i went ahead & watched that too, though it was on during the eclipse, so i missed a few scenes while adjusting the camera. but the movies were pretty good, at least as far as "family" movies go. i wouldn't go out of my way to see them, but the stories were decent, the fx were great, and so on. hardly compares to the lord of the rings trilogy, but then again what does?