eclipse - an oddly moving experience
Nov. 14th, 2012 08:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eI watched the eclipse this morning... luckily. I came close to missing it. Having risen at about 5am, as I usually do, I had my naughty cup of coffee (gotta give that drug up again), then checked my emails. It was during the writing of an email that I suddenly remembered -- Holy cow! The eclipse!
So I grabbed a couple of pieces of paper, a piece of cereal packet, my HTC handheld computer (as camera), a tripod, a clothes peg, and a chair. Then I went outside and set up this simple rig.
The cardboard didn't work as well as a piece of paper because it was difficult to make a nice clean hole in the cardboard, but easy in the paper. I tried it with both. The hole has some tradeoffs. If you make it small then the image is nice and sharp, but not much light gets through so the image has less contrast. If you make it larger, then the image is not as sharp, but is brighter. I made a hole about the size of a darning needle; somewhat smaller than a matchstick.
at 6:20am
at 6:51 -- pretty-much the high-point of the eclipse at my spot on the planet
at 7:53am -- just a flat spot remaining... almost over
I confess I didn't realise we would get so close to total eclipse at our latitude. Very cool.
At the height of the eclipse everything looked quite gray, as if much of the color had bled out of the world; like sliding the color saturation down on an image processing program. This is because the sun's light wasn't slanting through so much atmosphere and dust, which would normally filter out a lot of the blue light to produce gold or red imbalance. At the sun's height during the eclipse the light balance was about normal, but there was just less of it -- a quite unfamiliar event. It looked weird. The desire to look directly at the sun became almost overwhelming. I was thankfully prevented from doing so by my knowledge that the dimmness was deceptive, making it easier to allow much more dangerous levels of light from the crescent of remaining sun to be focussed in a burning point on the retinas of the eyes, frying the cells that detect light there. I wonder how many people were unable to resist.
Because the whole thing took quite a long time it was a surprisingly meditative experience. Out here there is very little noise except for the birds. My little dog and I simply sat and thought and watched. I became very conscious of the enormous spheres, the astronomical distances between them, and the forces at work: our nearly planet-sized moon casting its shadow across our world, blocking the light from the giant thermonuclear furnace of a sun, safely almost 150 million kilometers (92 million miles) away. The position of the moon against the sun appearing to shift much faster than it really was because our planet's rotation was moving me past the shadow, which swept over Cairns.
Watching all the ants, beetles, flies, bees, birds, and other small creatures going obliviously about their daily lives I felt so privileged to be able to understand what was happening. Our giant brains place us humans so far beyond even extraordinarily smart creatures like my little dog at my side or the parrots clowning around in the trees above me. How lucky I am to be able to see this incredible event for what it is. I felt very moved.
So I grabbed a couple of pieces of paper, a piece of cereal packet, my HTC handheld computer (as camera), a tripod, a clothes peg, and a chair. Then I went outside and set up this simple rig.
The cardboard didn't work as well as a piece of paper because it was difficult to make a nice clean hole in the cardboard, but easy in the paper. I tried it with both. The hole has some tradeoffs. If you make it small then the image is nice and sharp, but not much light gets through so the image has less contrast. If you make it larger, then the image is not as sharp, but is brighter. I made a hole about the size of a darning needle; somewhat smaller than a matchstick.
at 6:20am
at 6:51 -- pretty-much the high-point of the eclipse at my spot on the planet
at 7:53am -- just a flat spot remaining... almost over
I confess I didn't realise we would get so close to total eclipse at our latitude. Very cool.
At the height of the eclipse everything looked quite gray, as if much of the color had bled out of the world; like sliding the color saturation down on an image processing program. This is because the sun's light wasn't slanting through so much atmosphere and dust, which would normally filter out a lot of the blue light to produce gold or red imbalance. At the sun's height during the eclipse the light balance was about normal, but there was just less of it -- a quite unfamiliar event. It looked weird. The desire to look directly at the sun became almost overwhelming. I was thankfully prevented from doing so by my knowledge that the dimmness was deceptive, making it easier to allow much more dangerous levels of light from the crescent of remaining sun to be focussed in a burning point on the retinas of the eyes, frying the cells that detect light there. I wonder how many people were unable to resist.
Because the whole thing took quite a long time it was a surprisingly meditative experience. Out here there is very little noise except for the birds. My little dog and I simply sat and thought and watched. I became very conscious of the enormous spheres, the astronomical distances between them, and the forces at work: our nearly planet-sized moon casting its shadow across our world, blocking the light from the giant thermonuclear furnace of a sun, safely almost 150 million kilometers (92 million miles) away. The position of the moon against the sun appearing to shift much faster than it really was because our planet's rotation was moving me past the shadow, which swept over Cairns.
Watching all the ants, beetles, flies, bees, birds, and other small creatures going obliviously about their daily lives I felt so privileged to be able to understand what was happening. Our giant brains place us humans so far beyond even extraordinarily smart creatures like my little dog at my side or the parrots clowning around in the trees above me. How lucky I am to be able to see this incredible event for what it is. I felt very moved.