Sunday, May 20, 2012

What happened to the sun?

Trying to see the solar eclipse

The scene above is what you get when you're a not-scientifically-oriented procrastinator.

Solar eclipse light effectI got home late this afternoon and didn't even remember the eclipse until the light suddenly changed. My daughter and I wanted to view the eclipse, and of course, we know we're not supposed to look directly at the sun. So I tried the paper-with-a-pinhole method first, with no results. Then I tried the paper-with-a-hole-punch method. That didn't work either.

So instead, I'll tell you about the effect of the eclipse on the light on my garden. It is dull. The sun is out, there are shadows, but the brightness is missing. For southern Californians, this kind of light typically means that there's a serious wildfire burning somewhere nearby, but there's no smell, no ashes floating to the ground.

All around, rather an eery effect.

How about you? Were you able to see the first annular solar eclipse in 18 years?

1 comment:

  1. Yea. We used a piece of tinfoil with a few pin holes and then used the wall instead of the ground. The idea is to get a straight line from the sun, through the hole onto the viewing surface. As you can see by the shadow in your pic, you didn't have a straight line. So a piece of tinfoil with a few pin holes using the wall as the viewing surface worked great.

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