First Principles

Today, of course, we here in northern Nevada were lucky enough to be in the path of an annular solar eclipse.  If you’re really into the science of it, here’s a great article.  Since I’m not as smart as Ethan Siegel, though (which is why I blog about politics instead of astrophysics), I’ll just share some pretty cool pictures (if I do say so) I shot of the event from my back yard.

I took the pictures from my back yard, using my little point-and-click Canon Powershot SD1000 Digital Elph, shot through an old US Navy sextant I’ve had for years.  Fortunately, the sun filters still worked on it, and it made for an ideal viewer.

Waaaay cooler than the paper ones they were selling at UNR...

I really am looking at the sun - the sextant has an agled mirror on it to let you align a celestial object with the horizon.

The shadows the eclipse made we incredibly cool.  As long as you had a tree, who needs a “pin hole camera” made out of paper plates?  You could see the entire sequence of the eclipse.

At the height of the eclipse, everything had this funky haze arounds its shadow.

The quality of light was very cool, too.

But enough with the shadows – here’s the real deal in sequence!  I was doing a lot of experimenting with settings, zooms, etc., which is the reason the sizes of the pictures themselves are different.  Next time, I’ll get a sun filter for my telescope so I can keep it steady on the tripod – 2045 is right around the corner!

There were a few clouds towards the end, and for some reason I had a hard time dialing the camera/sextant combo in after the maximum eclipse, but fortunately we were able to watch nearly the whole thing. How lucky we were to witness this right here in Reno!