Tag: eclipse

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Ancient Web: Eclipse ’98 Survived a Million-Hit Live Webcast

Eclipse ’98 is what a live Internet event looked like when “scale” meant finding enough mirror servers before the crowd arrived.

Visit the Eclipse ’98 archive

The site was built for the total solar eclipse of February 26, 1998 in the Caribbean. Its volunteer E-team wanted to publish educational material before and after the event and deliver live eclipse images during totality.

The surviving “Lessons Learned” document is better than a polished retrospective because it records the actual engineering problems.

Seven hundred files and twelve servers

The team says the site contained more than 700 files from multiple authors. Twelve server sites supported Eclipse ’98 on eclipse day, and estimated traffic exceeded one million accesses. One mirror alone reportedly handled more than 220,000 hits.

The architecture sounds wonderfully transitional now: static HTML pages, CGI scripts, FTP image servers, mirror sites, distribution scripts, guestbooks, and a separate “post office.”

The webcast portion struggled under saturation. Servers that were supposed to distribute fresh images were also busy serving ordinary HTML. The team later concluded that dedicated image servers and better traffic prioritization would have helped.

Browser compatibility was another headache.

The pages were primarily built on Windows 95 using Netscape 4.x. Internet Explorer, Macintosh systems, Windows 3.1, screen sizes below 800×600, MIME mappings on older servers, and differences between browsers all created trouble.

The authors put it plainly: the web’s promise of standards and portability was still far from automatic.

The communication stack is just as period-specific. E-mail did most of the work, with ICQ, NetMeeting, and AOL Instant Messenger used when the team needed tighter coordination.

That makes Eclipse ’98 more than an astronomy site. It is a preserved postmortem from the era when a million-hit day could be fought with mirrors, FTP, volunteer labor, and a lot of improvisation.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes sites like this because the web’s history is not only in old page designs. It is also in the infrastructure notes people left behind after something unexpectedly worked—or almost worked.

Eclipse ’98 caught the shadow.

Its postmortem caught the web around it.

Return to Eclipse ’98

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Ancient Web: MrEclipse Teaches Lunar Eclipse Photography From Film to DSLRs

MrEclipse has the rare distinction of being an old photography guide that survived long enough to explain both film and digital cameras without throwing either one away.

Read MrEclipse’s lunar eclipse photography guide

Fred Espenak’s page walks through the practical problems of photographing a lunar eclipse: camera choice, focal length, exposure, tripod stability, star trails, multiple exposures, telephoto work, image scale, and the huge change in brightness that occurs as the Moon enters Earth’s shadow.

The examples span decades.

A 1982 total lunar eclipse was captured on Ektachrome 400 with a 50mm Nikkor lens. A 2000 eclipse used Kodak film for a multiple-exposure sequence. Later sections explain DSLR histograms, digital compositing and the crop-factor difference between 35mm film and common digital sensors.

The result is less a dated tutorial than a visible history of astrophotography changing underneath one subject.

The Moon did not change. The workflow did.

Some advice remains beautifully mechanical.

The Moon moves across the sky at roughly fifteen degrees per hour. A lens determines the available field of view. Long exposures produce trails because Earth rotates. Very long focal lengths magnify the Moon but make framing and vibration more difficult.

Other advice belongs to a specific photographic era: load the film, use a cable release, make sure the camera is taken out of multiple-exposure mode, and advance a few frames so the next photograph does not land on top of the eclipse you just spent hours recording.

The guide also explains the Danjon scale, which ranks the brightness and color of a total lunar eclipse from very dark to bright copper-red or orange. Because totality can vary dramatically, Espenak recommends using exposure tables as a starting point and bracketing rather than pretending one setting will work every time.

That practical caution is why the page ages well.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains many technical pages whose equipment is old but whose underlying reasoning remains useful.

MrEclipse is one of them.

Cameras changed. The geometry did not.

Return to MrEclipse