Annular Eclipse: Old Reliable to the Rescue

May 20th, 2012 is my brother's 22nd birthday, "or at least that's what we're telling people", but it's also the day of an annular eclipse, visible to the western states of America, as well as to many fine folks in Asia.

The annular eclipse is also known as the "ring of fire" eclipse, and occurs when the moon is farther away from the planet than under the conditions of a "total" eclipse. In the annular eclipse, the moon appears smaller than the sun, leading to, when the moon is directly between the sun and the earth, a ring of sun still visible.

This happened today, and while you had to be in Redding, California to see the full of "ring of fire", the effects were able to be witnessed in some form or another down here in Long Beach. With just a portion of the sun was covered, the daylight seemed a tiny bit dimmer, but actually looking at the sun was like normal--and not recommended.

I tried a pinprick paper, to test the shape of the sun on another piece, with mixed results. Then I remembered something that could help in this exact situation:

This is a picture I had in a post about the beginning of the year for the ancients. It is a picture of the pier at dusk in Avila Bay. The setting sun is visible as a black dot, as the old-school sensor for my old Digitrex camera was easily overwhelmed by the direct rays from the sun. Ah, that Digitrex. I've mentioned it before about vignetting and again about rediscovering it.

That limitation might be able to be of some service, I realized with time running out and the moon soon to be out of the sun's way. In the above picture we can see the circle blocked by the mountain, so, if anything, the moon might block some of the rays of the sun, and give us a document of this annular eclipse, something our eyes can't do.

So, looking away, I, for the first time ever, purposely pointed a digital camera directly at the sun, and hoped for the best. Here's what we got:

I'm willing to call that a success. The moon can be seen making a curved crescent of the all-black sun. Pretty cool.

This next picture is from our back balcony, and a slight movement as the shutter fired gives a cool curvy look to normally straight structures.

Thank you, Old Reliable. 15K pictures and still helping out in ways we're still learning about.