Watching the Solar Eclipse

Most people used either cardboard glasses or various contraptions of differing size and effectiveness that, in their most basic form, were simple pinhole cameras.

I had my trusty old HPX 301E camcorder for that. It is pretty big and bulky, but it has a wonderful zoom lens. It was a pretty big gamble on my part. I never shot anything comparable before. I didn't have the opportunity to do so even if I wanted to. The last partial eclipse of a similar magnitude happened before I was even born! The filters might not have been strong enough, diffraction from the aperture might have caused the resulting image to become blurry, and there was always the looming possibility of burning a hole into the sensor.

My Crude Attempt at a Camera Obscura

This was my hastily cobbled-together attempt at a camera obscura. I used a glass cleaning wrapper that I happened to have and a clipboard I originally intended to use to pass the time drawing.

I got better results than expected. I didn't expect to see anything at all to be quite frank, projecting the image in the open like I did. From experimentation, focal distance does not affect the sharpness of the image, and it shouldn't, but brightness does unfortunately decrease to the inverse square of distance. There's an exponential loss in image brightness and constrast trying to get a larger image, so there is a trade-off between image size and visibility.

Nice People

I fortunately found ways to pass the time in a myriad of other interesting ways now that my clipboard got busy projecting an image of the sun. There was this interesting, nice couple I met, one particular Darina Farrell and Kurt Baehler, Irish and Swiss respectively. Two cyclists who have traveled almost half the world and who gave me wonderful company during the eclipse viewing.¹ There were also a few onlookers who approached me to ask about the camcorder, and others who wanted to watch the solar eclipse from the tiny flip-out monitor because they couldn't get solar glasses or make a camera obscura in time. Speaking of which, this couple mentioned that they had never seen solar glasses sell out so rapidly and didn't expect such widespread public interest.

I was a nervous wreck talking to so many strangers, but all things considered, it might have been the best day of the year --seeing all of these people gathered in crowds, curious. This moment brought me some hope for humanity and its future interest in space exploration.

Without further ado, here is the footage I gathered:

Here is the same video on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5eVzhsbRaY and a direct download link if your browser doesn't support the video tag videos/eclipse.mp4

Note: The video quality on Youtube will be worse due to their own video compression.

Music credit goes to: Holst: The Planets, Op. 32: V. Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age · Berliner Philharmoniker · Herbert von Karajan · Gustav Holst

One of the many unfortunate things we have to live with is how much data Google collects from its users. We will, however, take that to our advantage because, fortunately, most of that data is publicly available in one form or another. In our case, it's Google Trends.

Here is a graph and a few statistics of people googling "eyes hurt" and related search terms.² You may notice how nicely the spike in the "interest over time" graph coincides with when the solar eclipse was visible. The human species never ceases to amaze in how many creative ways it finds to hurt itself, and to document all that evidence in a neat graph. Delightful!