Eclipse Watching
I was all set to break out my daughter's Astroscan telescope with the sun viewing screen for the eclipse. But when I went to go grab the sun viewing screen last night, it wasn't where I thought it was. And for a variety of home improvement & other reasons, our house is a bit of a mess right now, so further searching for the screen proved fruitless. But, at least I still had the telescope itself and the lenses. And I happened to come across a creative idea on Google this morning - a homemade sun funnel (directions from NASA). So I took a bit of an early lunch break, ran to Walmart, and bought everything I'd need to make it, then came back, and with the help of a co-worker (I have a broken foot right now and didn't want to go tramping around the shop), got it all put together just in time for the eclipse. Here are a few photos of what we saw here in Wichita Falls - the first showing our setup, the second at the max obscuration, and the third a little later, but with my camera's brightness adjusted to make the sun spots more clear.
Since we're engineers, we also couldn't resist taking measurements. We pulled out a tape measure, and took the following measurements from the image projected on the screen:
Assuming the same diameter for the moon and sun, those measurements correspond to a max obscuration of 82.5%. According to NASA, max obscuration where we were watching was 77.44% - not too bad for our less than precise methods.
Anyway, it was a nice little diversion today at work, going out every half hour or so to check on the eclipse's progress. One guy's wife and son even showed up to take a look. And the homemade sun funnel worked great - though I already have ideas for minor improvements before the next eclipse.
