Last night, May 20, we left the Bay Area to watch a solar eclipse occur in Chico, California.
It was very much a 'Woodstock' like event with hundreds of people gathered around the isolated observatory. Hobbyists brought their telescopes and enthusiastically greeted lines of people who wanted to take a peek at the sun (spots and flares were all readily visible).
We arrived around 5p.m., just in time to learn how to create our own sun lattices with our hands and aluminum foil pinholes. Per the white board below, the ring of fire showed up around 6:30p.m.
We made friends with the box head. He was incredibly kind and taught us how to effectively create our own solar pin-hole viewers.
Somewhere in the crowd you'll see our other friends; the welder and the lattice guy. In order to secure two pairs of solar viewer glasses (they block 99.999% of the light), we made a generation contribution to the local scholarship fund.
Here's the inverted projection from one of the pin-hole viewers.
Fortunately, I bumped into a guy who taught me how to effectively take pictures of the sun with my camera. The trick was to zoom all the way in with my camera (40X) and take the picture behind the solar viewer glasses. Here was the result:
Pretty awesome right? The pic below shows how you make a finger lattice.
Look at the projection below. You can see a partial eclipse.
The full eclipse looks like eyes, right!?
I'll close with the last few images of the fading eclipse...
