Photos of Oct. 14, 2023, Solar Eclipse

I was able to capture some decent photos of the annular solar eclipse today. (Annular eclipse = a “full” eclipse that does not fully cover the sun because, due to the position of the Moon and Earth relative to the Sun the shadow the moon casts on the surface of the earth is not quite as big as the diameter of the sun as seen from Earth. Therefore, at full annularity what you see is a ring of sun around the shadow of the moon.)

In Camarillo, where I live (50 miles northwest of Los Angeles), we got only about 75% of the show since the “path” of “full annularity” went over the US at higher latitudes. What we saw here is a large “bite” out of the cookie. See my photos below.

The way I took the photos was with a pinhole camera. A small hole in the wall of a darkened box will cast an image on the opposite surface that is an inverted image of what you “point” the box at. In my case, the box had to be about 2 meters long in order for the image to be reasonably large. That’s because of the thing being “photographed” is very small. There’s a relationship between the diameter of the hole, this size of the image and the length of the optical path inside the box. Since astronomy is one of my hobbies, this was a fun activity.

I first built a a pinhole camera like this to photograph the transit of Venus across the Sun (as seen from Earth, Venus appears as a black dot moving across the face of the Sun). Transits of Venus are among the rarest of all predictable astronomical phenomena. There were two in the 21st century: 8 June 2004 and 6 June 2012. I captured the one in 2012. The previous transits were in 1874 and 1882 and the next transits are not until 2117 and 2125. It is likely that my children and possibly my grandchildren will not live to see those. So, very rare event and I got some photos. See separate post here.