Solar Eclipse

This past week we’ve had the pleasure of guests. Our friends the Johnsons are visiting from Minnesota. Yesterday, in Colorado, we were blessed with an even rarer visit from an annular solar eclipse. That is what happens when the Moon passes directly (or nearly so in our case) between the Sun and the Earth. In the case of an annular eclipse, the Moon is too far from the Earth to completely block out the Sun, and an annulus or ring is visible when the objects are perfectly aligned. We didn’t get to see a complete annulus at our location, but we did have some fun in the backyard as the eclipse approached. I got several photos of the eclipse in progress, and Jess and Todd caught pretty good glimpses of the peak event from the middle of the street in front of our house. Sadly, the clouds and horizon conspired to rob us of much of the more spectacular show, but we had some fun watching all the same. Here is a picture from early in the eclipse I shopt in the back yard. For those interested, it was shot using a tripod-mounted Nikon D5000 with a 1/800 sec. exposure at f/11 with a #11 (shade factor) welding glass for a solar filter. The lens was an Nikkor AF-S 24–85 mm 1:3.5–4.5 G ED set at 85 mm (127 mm equivalent). The filter was mounted using a rubber band stretched over an inverted lens hood—a clever idea I found on the Internet, but I can’t remember the source.