Ready for a Lunar blast.....

A few of you may have heard that NASA is planning on crashing a probe into the surface of the Moon early Friday morning. The purpose of the crash is to try and detect water deep inside the craters along the pole that never see the light of day. If you want to read about exactly what's going to happen, here's a media report in layman's terms. If you are interested in a bit more technical info about the mission you can read all about it here on NASA's website. NASA is even planning on broadcasting the event live on NASA TV and on the web.

There's hope that the impact will be visible in modest amateur telescopes so I plan on trying to capture the event myself. For those of you on the west coast, you'll have to be hard-core to get up for this event. It's going to impact the moon at approximately 4:30am PDT.

I plan on recording the event in HD through my Meade 10" SCT scope. It's really just a giant telephoto lens. And when I say "giant", I mean giant. It's equivalent to a 3048mm F10 telephoto lens. I'll have my Canon 5D MII hooked up to catch the even in beautiful 1920x1080 HD.

Even though I've had the camera for almost a year, I've never got around to trying to capture the moon on video through the scope so tonight I figured I would set everything up for a test run so I have no kinks early Friday morning.
As soon as the clip has finished processing I will add it to this post.

Hopefully the weather will cooperate and be clear Friday morning. If so, I should have some exciting video to share by late Friday morning and if I remember I'll take some BTS shots as well.

UPDATE: Here's the video clip!