How the East was won: Al Jazeera - People and power

Though I am personally disappointed and constantly disillusioned by the quality and content of international reporting on what goes on in Sri Lanka, Al Jazeera seems to be trying to get the balance right. In the absence of even the concept of neutrality/independence/non-bias when it comes to many print and electronic media in Sri Lanka, if a source is labeled 'biased' by both parties to the conflict, thats probably the closest it gets to being 'independent'. Though it is sad, this seems to be the reality as far as present day Sri Lanka is concerned.

The following two part video report by Juliana Ruhfus for the People and power programme is about the aftermath of the military offensive in the East of Sri Lanka.

People & Power - How The East Was Won - 26 Aug 07- Part 1


People & Power - How The East Was Won - 26 Aug 07 - Part 2


Source: Al Jazeera English Programmes - How the East was won - Juliana Ruhfus

Lunar eclipse

It was a nice exercise to take a series of photos of the total lunar eclipse 28 August. I ended up clicking over 250 photos! Well, all of them were exposure bracketed so the actual number of frames are a little less :-)

The sky was clear, the weather was nice and the eclipse started at a more civilized time here in Australia than in some other parts of the world so it was an opportunity not to be missed. The photos in the montage below were taken between 7.00pm - 11.00pm AEST in Canberra, ACT, Australia.

Eclipse montage, originally uploaded by NavindaK.

The start of the series is from the bottom of the right hand side arc going up, which then continues up from the bottom of the left hand side arc.

It was only when I was arranging the photos in this montage did I notice the angle of entry and exit of the shadow. You would notice that the shadow 'enters' the moon almost directly from below and leaves it at an angle leaning left. It is as if the shadow traveled over the moon in a left bound arc. Incidentally, this is the same direction/path in which the moon rose up in the night sky. I have tried to approximately reconstruct the moon travel arc on the photo above.

I had a discussion with a friend of mine about the reason for this and he came up with an explanation which has to do with the plane on which the Moon orbits the Earth. Anybody else have any theories/suggestions as to why this is so?