A Solar Eclipse

 On Sunday there was a solar eclipse that was going to include a ring of fire (where the moon moves in between the sun and Earth but you can still see a ring of the sun around the moon).  Brian bought some solar eclipse viewing glasses for $4.50 and then also decided to create some pin hole cameras for fun.  We had a long cardboard tube that he cut into a 6 foot length.  He then taped some aluminum foil on one end and made a pin hole as you can see here.

 Then he taped some white paper on the other end of the tube and cut a hole in the side to allow viewing of the image of the sun.  You can see a faint white circle in the picture below, that's the sun.  At the bottom of this post you can see a slide show video of the various images of the sun that we took pictures of using our pin hole camera as the eclipse progressed.

We watched the eclipse from about 6:30 to 8:00 pm on our back porch.  The trees made their own pin hole camera images on the back wall of our house.  Cool huh?

We could also make eclipse images with our hands by interleaving our fingers and looking at the shadow on the wall.

Here was what our dining room wall looked like about the time of the peak of the eclipse.  See all those crescent shapes?  Those are images of the eclipse.  Lucas and Marcus said they could see the moon, since those crescents looked like crescent moons but it's really the crescent sun being blocked by the moon.

Here's the two older scientist boys using their pin hole cameras.  Travis was quite interested in this.  Hopefully he'll remember it since it won't be for another 20 years before he'll have another opportunity to see this thing again.

And here's the slide show video, set to music (should be somewhat funny if you catch the music theme).  The images aren't crisp but it's pretty cool all things considered.  Brian used the pin hole camera much more than he used his glasses that he paid for.  The glasses allowed direct viewing of the sun but it was scary to look directly into the sun even though you should be protected.