Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Eclipsing Amman

Although we missed out on last month’s full lunar eclipse, because it wasn’t visible from the Middle East, we were in a good place to see today’s partial solar eclipse. We don’t have any of the proper viewing equipment, and we only have simple digital cameras (although our Sony Cybershot is pretty good for point and shoot) but, thank goodness for a little cloud cover!! It allowed me to take some decent photos. The kids were very excited about the opportunity to see an eclipse… Honor jumped at the chance to wiki it, and that smart little cookie even knew how to spell eclipse properly! Brian looked up several methods for safe viewing, and we tried a pinhole camera method, as well as reflecting the sun with a mirror. Neither worked very well for us. Maybe it would have been better during a full eclipse? I simply aimed the camera in the general direction, zoomed it as far as it would zoom, and snapped lots and lots of photos. I actually managed to get some rather nice ones.

Here’s one right before the eclipse.

sun5

and during…

sun1

The photo below is my favorite. I love the light on the clouds.

sun2

sun3

sun4

the end!

sun6

6 comments:

Donna said...

Why did no one tell me about this until after it was over? So bummed to have missed it...

Connie said...

Sorry! Kids and I were just being randomly geeky. I didn't think to send a text!

Becky said...

That is so cool! Glad you guys could see that. Thanks for sharing your photos.

betty-NZ said...

How awesome! Aren't modern cameras great!!

Daniela Swider said...

Very neat! Bet the kids were excited.

Connie said...

I was afraid our camera would be unable to capture any of it, yes, thank goodness for modern cameras... and that perfectly timed cloud! Looking at these photos again, I realize I didn't use paintshop to crop/zoom in on any of the eclipse photos...I always take photos at a high resolution to allow cropping, or in case I ever get something really good that I want to have printed. I suppose I could play with it, but I really like the clouds, so I didn't even think about it!

Daniela - the kids were excited, up until the pinhole camera and mirror trick turned out to be such a failure and they couldn't look at it! They enjoyed looking up eclipse facts and photos online. When I put our photos on my computer, they were excited again.