I went for a walk with my friend today through the forest. It was a nice walk but a very dull day so the photo opportunities were few and far between. This is ok but it's not what it could have been on a nice sunny day. In fact the sun completely let us down today. There was a partial solar eclipse in progress at sunrise. Me and my dad went off in search of a good horizon to watch it from but with no real hope of seeing it since we were looking at a blanket of grey cloud.
There were breaks in it but few and far between and more overhead than near the horizon. We did actually manage to get a glimpse of it but only once the moon had pretty much left the disk of the sun (the notch on the left hand side is the moon). I managed to get a photo, which sucks, but is a minor miracle considering the conditions and how few people around us saw anything at all. What's even cooler is that the smudge on the disk is not, in fact, muck on my sensor as I had feared when I first looked at the photo, but a sunspot. The photo was taken through cloud and Baader film - I don't think I really need to tell you it's not safe to look directly at the sun since it should have been hammered into you since you were a kid, and if you got as far as this without knowing then I'm not sure how you're reading this. The saying amongst astronomers is you can only look at the sun through a telescope twice - once with the right eye and once with the left. Or if you're using binoculars, only once!
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Dang, those trees are cool looking! The branches look like could come alive and reach out to snatch the unwary passerby.
ReplyDeleteI rather like the eclipse picture - most of the time you'll see that circle (the moon) with the halo. But I've seen that so many times and this has character! Looks kind of like a distant planet, too, hehe.