Fun in the sun - Part 1

The day after my birthday I took a holiday from work, and it was a beautifully sunny day - luckily, because I wanted to view the eclipse! I headed out to the garden with some supplies - a colander, binoculars, mirrors, shoe boxes, paper, masking tape, cameras, tripods, etc!

I tried making a couple of pinhole viewers from cardboard boxes, but the image they gave was very small and no use for photographing! The colander was a lot of fun - while the circular holes in it give circular spots of light usually, during the eclipse, if you move it away from the paper, it gives areas of light in the shape of the eclipse.

The best views of the eclipse came from using the binoculars to project an image onto paper, but it was quite tricky to get the angle of the binoculars correct, and then to take a photograph at the same time! The camera kept going to sleep in the time it took me to line up the binoculars! So I'd recommend having some method of supporting the binoculars (another person would have worked, or I could have borrowed some clamp stands from work!). 

Covering one eye of the binoculars gave a single image of the eclipse, and leaving them both open gave two.

During the eclipse, it got cooler and darker, and it felt a bit like sunset, then it suddenly got lighter again, and before long was back to normal. And, if you had tried to directly look at the sun, all you'd have seen is a whole lot of glare the same as any other time you try to look at it (and your camera sees the same unless you have a special filter).

Come back tomorrow for more fun in the sun!