Paul's Chair - seen, but not noticed is what I was thinking. All the things we see, but do we take a moment to notice. So many beautiful moments to capture and share. Here, I noticed this beautiful shadow on the wall at the sun was setting. Hope you enjoy!
Captured both the sun and the moon today! The sun is very active with tons of sunspots and it's always fun to image a partial moon. I think this is my best moon image yet.
Both were captured with my Skywatcher 72ED and QHY 168C camera riding on my EQ6R mount. I used a solar filter to capture the sun (of course) and no filter at all for the moon.
For a lot of reasons, we didn’t arrange another road trip to see today’s total eclipse like we did in 2017 (which was amazing, by the way!). It was only partial out here in California, and not even with as high a magnitude as the one last October.
But we had clear skies, so we broke out the eclipse glasses from 2017 again. After testing them first by looking directly as a bright indoor lamp to make sure there were no scratches. And I’d heard that colanders make interesting patterns (each hole works as a pinhole camera) much like overlapping leaves do, so I brought that out — as you can see, it worked quite well!
I do kind of regret not being able to get out to see this one as total. Partial eclipses can be really cool, especially if you have multiple ways to observe them, but XKCD has a point. There really isn’t any comparison to experiencing totality, and it doesn’t come through very well in photos.
It is interesting to think that solar eclipses happen every year — usually twice! — but they’re not always total, and they’re only visible from a small part of the planet at a time. And sometimes that’s a slice of, say, Antarctica or Siberia or out in the middle of the ocean. Not rare for the planet, but definitely rare for any given location.
On one hand, it’s no wonder people used to see them as omens. With travel and communication slow (and in many cases impossible) in the ancient world, if you’re only going on what’s been seen in your area, it seems super-rare and unpredictable. On the other hand, cultures with sophisticated enough astronomy like the ancient Babylonians were able to calculate the eclipse cycle thousands of years ago!
One bit of funny timing: We’ve been catching up on the last season of The Magicians. Today we got up to an episode that…well, let’s just say the moon figures in it!
The #shadows were strangely shaped when the #eclipse was at its peak of 80% coverage. This is a picture of the shadows from the arbor over my patio that was covered with leafless vines.
Fencing with shadows in front of the Baha'i House of Worship for North America in Wilmette, Illinois. I just love the way the shadows and light play on the pavement.