Today, August 21, 2017, marked an event that was advertised for a month as "The Great American Eclipse" on many television stations in America. Certainly eclipse mania seemed to take many people, and speaking for myself, it was very fun to see.
Out here at western Washington we got about 90% occlusion as we were just outside of the full occlusion zone. I would have loved to go to Oregon for this but the traffic was
horrendous.
My dad and I decided we had a good spot out in his driveway and set out to enjoy ourselves. I snapped this without telling him I was going to:
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| Surprise, Dad! Selfie! |
My dad decided that he was going whole hog on this event and set out to create a
pinhole camera so that we could observe the eclipse without using shades.
He self-describes as a pack rat. We talked about whether or not that qualifies as hoarding, but as I myself have strong hoarder tendencies that I fight continuously, I have to say that for him, no, it doesn't. But because he's such a pack rat, and almost never throws any previous project away, he had enough materials to build this:
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| The SHTPV (Super High-Tech Pinhole Viewer) & my Dad |
I decided to call it the Super High-Tech Pinhole Viewer, or SHTPV. I wish I had pictures of the build process, because it was reportedly quite involved. He was busy with it in his shop for days. It is composed primarily of frames that he used to use to weather seal his front door windows in winter as they used to be single-pane glass. They were upgraded (I think) somewhere around 2001. That is wrapped in black plastic and is in turn mounted on a dolly with two support legs. It has an adjustable pole at the end to provide support.
I love this man. He's so inventive and creative, and doesn't get enough praise for it. I need to work on that.
We took several photos throughout the morning. Right now I'm just putting those up but I might edit this post later with more refined versions of these pictures.
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| Eclipse 001 |
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| Eclipse 002 |
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| Eclipse 003 |
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| Eclipse 004 |
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| Eclipse 005 |
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| Eclipse 006 |
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| Eclipse 007 |
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| Eclipse 008 |
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| Eclipse 009 |
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| Eclipse 010 |
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| Eclipse 011 |
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| Eclipse 012 |
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| Eclipse 013 |
I got a total of 117 shots of this, these were the best 13. Below I've included some other interesting photos that I took during the event.
I took two pictures of the sun directly, one with my solar shades over the lens, one without, at different times. (I admit that my solar shades said to not use them with any other optical advice. I ignored the warning.) The shot on the left is about 33% occlusion while the right is at maximum event, about 90% occlusion. The light so overawes the sensor in the camera that it just shows up as a white blob, while the camera itself saw the filter as the focusing barrier.
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| 33% Occlusion - Filtered |
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| 90% Occlusion - Unfiltered |
I tried to take a panoramic view at maximum event, but I failed to account for the phone's automatic light filtering, and it really just looks like a noon day shot, so I'm not posting it.
In all the event was quite surreal. It seemed that the world go very quiet, very quickly. Many of the birds in our area stopped their singing, and even my dad's cat seemed subdued at the moment. I don't recall hearing much traffic, or even the noise of the neighborhood. It's like we all took a long moment to just stop and look at the sky. The increased shade immediately lowered the temperature around us, and I even got a bit of a chill.
All in all quite the experience. I'm very happy I got to share it with my dad.
And I can't end this without paying some cat tax, so here's Callie, who was super excited that her people were outside:
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| Cat Tax |
