Life in a Day Project Moon
My Life in a Day Project Moon wasn’t planned at all; it just happened… and the few shots you see below hardly reflect what I saw, what I felt and how difficult it was under the circumstances to capture any images at all.
You may click on the picture below to see the brief High Definition Video I loaded to YouTube t0 understand what I mean. However, what I witnessed here – in the early morning hours of Saturday, the 24th July 2010 -, was an indication for me to take this day serious in terms of the “Life in a Day Project”, it was an invitation to dance :)
Life in a Day Project Moon
How did the “Life in a Day Project Moon” start?
Initially, I thought I’d hike high up into the Silver Mine Nature Reserve mountains just before sunrise, to film these absolutely unique and serene moments… especially as a week earlier I had been awed by what really seemed an early explosion of spring in Silvermine Nature Reserve. I posted a picture HERE.
So my NIKON Coolpix P90 was packed, my tripod was ready – and I relied on my inner watch to wake me at the right time.
It didn’t happen though… it was my cat, MadMax, who requested to go out… around 5 am. As we have winter right now in Noordhoek, South Africa, I found this odd as he loves to snooze until at least the wild Egyptian geese and the tremorous hadidas wake us with their clamorous concert.
It was still pitch-dark… but when I went to the terrace door I stopped in my tracks: there, right in front of me… past the dark and dreaming Noordhoek Valley with only a few street lights shimmering in the cold and gloomy air… high above the dark and strangely invisible Atlantic Ocean with not even a shadow of a separation at the horizon… right there was a blood-red, huge moon. It was a full moon, but black shadows wooshed across it horizontallygiving it an eery, oddly deformed shape.
Duh!
I had to get my camera quickly and take a picture! I forgot about the cold and got out onto the terrace with my camera on the tripod. There was absolutely no light… just very soft natural sounds.
As I started focusing, I discovered a very, very bright ‘star’ right beneath the moon. Hmmm… I wasn’t aware of any stars around at this time of the year (… and the National Observatory in Cape Town confirmed later that this wasn’t the case)… so what was it?
I zoomed in… and woosh! This ‘thing’ moved… and fast… and as I looked through the viewer there were colors I would never have expected… greens, pinks and everything shining if not pulsating strangely from inside.
There was no other light.
So was it a plane?
But suddenly it looked like an amoeba… then it changed shape and moved fast to the right…
I had to film this! Noone would believe the way this moved, so fast and changing shape all the time… but in the darkness and without yet being too familiar with the video setting on my digital camera, I didn’t find the switch! This was more than annoying… I felt I was losing precious time… and there this ‘light’ had disappeared to the far right and now it looked like a perfect disc scintillating in a green light shining from inside… so better than nothing I took another shot.
Finally, I found the video switch and now… where the heck did the moon go? It was so pitch dark I could hardly find anything through the viewer … then it was all over.
A bit frustrated and freezing, I took a shot of Kommetjie to the far left, with its lighthouse shining rhythmically and comforting… and then I decided this was it and went back inside to warm up and reflecting on what I had seen.
Life in a Day Ufo
Did my Life in a Day start with an… UFO?
It was certainly not a star, not a planet, not a satellite… and it moved too fast for a plane and the colors and shapes did not correspond to anything I knew… and my husband is an airplane and helicopter freak so I am familiar with quite some flying engines. So yes, this was an “Unidentified Flying Object” – that’s exactly what I saw, an UFO… not more, not less.
But there was a way to see more: to pull it up on ADOBE Photoshop and enlarge at least the disc… and this is what I did. The shape was pretty sharp given the immense distance and my simple camera. I enlarged to max – a whopping 3200% as you see on my YouTube Movie that I submitted later for the “Life in a Day” Project. With nothing but natural sounds as it happened…
You be the judge… nothing else was touched, although I do have some more pictures and footage.
Talking of footage… you see the video part at the end with the last shimmer of the red moon before it disappeared completely. What I left out here as I was searching the moon and moving the camera… was the disc to the far right, by now turned into a perfect sphere scintillating in soft greens, pinks and blue. This I only discovered at the end, when studying all the material. Amazing!
So that was my exciting start into the 24th July 2010… totally contrary to what I had expected! As the weather was absolutely lousy and it started to rain, there was no sun and thus no day to be welcomed either… so as is my way of doing things: I let things come and then see how I could respond. Mere intuition.
The sun only came after 2 pm that day… but long before that, there was something on my mind, something that drove me out with my camera and have yet another mesmerizing encounter…
To be continued. . .
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