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Moon in the Way
Aug. 21st, 2017 06:28 pmI knew a total solar eclipse was scheduled to cross the United States before I decided to use just about all of my vacation for this year on a cruise around northern Europe. The thought has come to me this is sliding back from the determination I'd managed to find to head to Florida and try to see one of the last space shuttle launches. However, I have managed to also think that in Florida I did see the Kennedy Space Center visitor centre before the contingency time I was able to visit Disney World with; travelling to even the most historically cloudless area for a few minutes of totality wasn't quite as appealing, somehow. I did, anyway, happen to hear in the final leadup to the eclipse another total eclipse will track across part of my home province in 2024: we just have to make it that far, of course.
While contemplating pinhole projectors and the card-shielded binoculars I'd rigged up for the transits of Venus, in visiting Best Buy to buy some external hard drives I happened to see boxes of eclipse glasses at the cash registers. I bought one of them, and spent a good bit of time afterwards wondering if I could really, really trust them to be legitimate and just would indicate the scratches that would require having to discard them. I did make another simple pinhole projector yesterday, just in case.
With the twenty-four news station always kept on at work showing the NASA feed reach totality over Oregon just as the first chip was taken out of the sun over here, I did take whatever risk the glasses meant, if through one open eye. Beyond the bite in the sun, I really did get a sense of the light dimming outside. While I'm still able to see through both eyes this evening, though, I'm trying to remember having seen instructions to build a simple viewer from dollar-store reading glasses.
While contemplating pinhole projectors and the card-shielded binoculars I'd rigged up for the transits of Venus, in visiting Best Buy to buy some external hard drives I happened to see boxes of eclipse glasses at the cash registers. I bought one of them, and spent a good bit of time afterwards wondering if I could really, really trust them to be legitimate and just would indicate the scratches that would require having to discard them. I did make another simple pinhole projector yesterday, just in case.
With the twenty-four news station always kept on at work showing the NASA feed reach totality over Oregon just as the first chip was taken out of the sun over here, I did take whatever risk the glasses meant, if through one open eye. Beyond the bite in the sun, I really did get a sense of the light dimming outside. While I'm still able to see through both eyes this evening, though, I'm trying to remember having seen instructions to build a simple viewer from dollar-store reading glasses.