Thursday, May 24, 2012

The Annular Solar Eclipse

First, I want to thank everyone for their kind and encouraging words for my Tuesday post. It has really meant a lot to me, reading those comments. So thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

So on Sunday, May 21 2012 there was an event that happened. It was the Annular Solar Eclipse! How cool is that!? An eclipse happens when the moon comes between the sun and the earth.

According to Wikipedia, an annular eclipse:

"occurs when the Sun and Moon are exactly in line, but the apparent size of the Moon is smaller than that of the Sun. Hence the Sun appears as a very bright ring, or annulus, surrounding the outline of the Moon. The next annular eclipse is on May 10, 2013"
So I put it in my phone to attempt to take pictures of this event. And I think I got some good ones! What we (my dad and I) did was used binoculars. We turned them so that the part you look through was what was closest to the paper and the end of the binoculars was what the sun shone through. Would you like to see some pictures?


So this is the beginning of the eclipse. You can barely start to see the moon making it's way in.


Further into the eclipse.


Haha! Why yes, that is the shadow of my head. We aimed the eclipse image on the paper into a shadow to make it show up better. :)


Look how bright it is even on paper! It is glowing!


And the toenail of the eclipse! haha! This was as much as we could see of it before it sank behind some houses next to us. (the extra white in the photo is where the shadow ended because by now the angle of the sun was harder to catch the eclipse with).

This was such an interesting event! I'm so glad I got to witness it and photograph it!

Did any of you witness this event?

4 comments:

  1. That is pretty amazing! even better that you got photo's of it. They would look amazing framed.

    ReplyDelete
  2. omg that's amazing Kirsten! Thanks for capturing it so beautifully for the rest of us who were on the wrong side of the world at that time(:

    ReplyDelete
  3. This is amazing! Obviously I didn't see it as I'm in Europe, but there was a similar event 10 years ago. That was impressive :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. WAY COOL! I went home sick and slept the eclipse and the afternoon away. Fantastic pictures Kirsten. :)

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for taking the time to read and comment on my blog! I love getting comments! Though I may not be able to respond to each one right away, I do read and appreciate each and every one, they are actually a highlight of my day! If you have any questions, I'll try my best to respond quickly! If you would like for me to check out your blog, email me your link: geekyowl (at) gmail (dot) com.