Vancouverites were treated to an almost 90% eclipse of the sun today. Two of my colleagues and I played hooky for an hour or so this morning to visit the park and check out the phenomenon.
My eclipse mindset got a kick-start this morning when I saw Fatima’s post at Stacks and Ranges. Her Music Monday featured Bonnie Tyler’s 1983 hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart” written by Jim Steinman. This was running through my head all morning! Incidentally, Bonnie Tyler sang the song today on a Royal Caribbean cruise as it sailed through the path of totality. Time Magazine reports that today “Tyler’s song rose to the number one spot on Apple’s iTunes charts”!
With safe eclipse-viewing glasses being completely sold out and fakes on Amazon abounding, my colleagues and I instead tried a few homegrown methods to watch the sun become eclipsed.
- There was the full cardboard box viewer over the head — quite a look! A small hole in a piece of tin foil projected a reasonable image on the back of the box.
- Highly recommended came the cereal-box viewer, with an eye-hole cut into one corner and a pierced piece of tin foil on the next. Again a pretty good projection.
- One of my colleagues tried filming the sun over his shoulder with an unfiltered cell phone camera, but the sun was so bright that it was just a massive ball of light, regardless of where it was in the eclipse progression.
I resorted to the old-school pinhole projector to safely watch the action. Simple and inexpensive, this was perhaps the best result we achieved, maybe because the pinhole was smoother in paper than in foil. The paper with the pinhole in it essentially acts as a lens, inverting the image and projecting it on the piece of paper used as the screen.
A couple of friendly fellow park-goers were nice enough to let us take a look through the viewers they bought in Singapore, and sure enough, my projected image was the upside-down version of the direct image, but looking like the moon instead of the sun! Here are a couple of pictures I took of the image projected on the “screen”.
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- Eclipse Projection 10:13 a.m.
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- Eclipse Projection at max 10:24 a.m.
CBC has posted a 56 second time-lapsed direct view of the eclipse from Vancouver here.
This afternoon, I received a really inventive marketing email that made me laugh — way to capitalize on the natural phenomenon!
And finally, the song I’ve been singing since our excursion to the park this morning is Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun”.
I'm Feeling This 
It was 84% here, but we didn’t try to view it. I was surprised at how light it was outside even so, but my ex the physicist informed me that the eye’s capacity to perceive light is measured logarithmically, i.e., 85% is really still very light out.
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Physics was never my strong suit. But it definitely got a bit darker and strangely quiet at the max coverage point. And we noticed on the car dash that the outside temperature actually dropped by 5 degrees Celsius.
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my friends down South said you could also hear the cicadas, who were apparently confused by the lack of light.
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Interesting. In hindsight, it would have been cool to drive down to Oregon, which had around 2 minutes of total darkness!
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I’ve read several people mentioning the cicadas but here, it doesn’t have to be dusk for them to make noise, they’re pretty much at it all day long (I don’t like cicadas 😉 )
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I remember the partial eclipse in August 1999. I was deeply disappointed that neither did the birds stop singing, nor did it get dark…
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So cool. The next total eclipse coming my way is only in 2024…
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That one won’t pass over my part of Canada. I remember there was a total eclipse when I was 10 (the one in Carly Simon’s ‘You’re So Vain’), but all I remember is “don’t look at the sun!”
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I think there are a number of eclipses before the next European one – but happening in other parts of the world…
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we used a pair of bird watching binoculars, held in hand to let the light shine through onto a piece of white paper clipped to a clip board. it was a very sharp image! we could even see the clouds passing over. I was bummed that it didn’t get as dark as I expected (I’m in central Indiana, US), just looked/felt like a storm was coming in. the shadows through the leaves on the trees were trippy, though 🙂
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Oh I heard you could do that! Sound like a really sharp image if you could see clouds! Yeah, it got a bit darker here, but was still pretty bright.
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Cool!
I was on honeymoon in Portugal when there was a partial eclipse there. I remember it only getting slightly darker and the birds started singing.
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That’s a cool honeymoon memory! Ours was in Mexico.
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Honeymoon or last eclipse or both?
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No, just honeymoon. The sun was pretty intense there!
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I can imagine. Mexico sounds like a fun destination.
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