Eclipse of the Sun in Seattle

I live in the Seattle area, and I was surprised that most of the people I told that there would be an eclipse today didn’t know about it. I used my NASA-approved dark plastic lenses to watch. It started out looking like a chunk had been taken out of the sun. At the maximum, 95% of the sun was covered. I definitely felt the wind pick up, since the decrease of heat in our area of the atmosphere caused unequal air pressures.

I tried a few times to get a picture, but my phone would just show a bright blur of light—that’s how bright the sun is, even during a partial eclipse. I finally got a picture. But it looked impossible. The eclipse was reversed! How could that happen?

I first thought the phone had somehow picked up a reflection of the dark lenses I was using. But the camera was aimed away from me, at the sun.

I finally realized it was some internal reflection inside the camera, caused by the brightness of the sun. The blur in the upper right is the real eclipse. The image in the lower left is the internal reflection.

But that was my fun in the partially-eclipsed sun.