Key's Occasional Blog

Solar Eclipse!

Location: Florida Creating:
Mood: stoked Eating: Burrito (yum!)
Listening: Drinking: Coca-Cola
Playing: Watching: Brain Blaze - Weird Things the Airline Industry Doesn't Want You to Know

So today there was a solar eclipse! From my house, it was only about a 50% coverage eclipse, though where my mom lives in Texas it was apparently a total one, which is neat. I saw some video and it must be super surreal to experience in person. o3o

Somehow, in my 40 years, I've never experienced an eclipse at all, not even a partial one. I don't know if I've slept through ones that have happened or what but I've never actually seen one. So today was a pretty cool experience even if it wasn't a total eclipse here.

Not having eclipse-viewing glasses, we went with the pinhole viewer method. Using Ritz crackers (yes, really). The holes in the crackers weren't all the way through in spots so we helped them along with toothpicks, but then we had perfectly serviceable little contraptions with which to view the eclipse. And it worked beautifully, as you can see in the photo on the right here.

a shadow showing a person (me) holding out a Ritz cracker; each of the five holes in the Ritz cracker display a crescent shape instead of a circle, showing the ongoing eclipse.

Additionally, thanks to my house actually having trees despite most of the neighorhood having cut down theirs over the years (I don't get it. It's Florida. You'd think they'd want the shade.), I was able to experience the wicked cool phenomenon of the tree foliage casting little crescent-shaped shadows on the ground! This was even cooler than the cracker, I have to admit.

The shadows of tree foliage on the ground; the eclipsed sun causes the bits of sun filtering through the leaves to display as many overlapping crescent shapes!

All in all it was a really cool time and I wish eclipses weren't so darned far apart! I wanna do it again! 🤣