no fixed abode

I was thinking about eclipses. There was a partial solar eclipse visible from Dublin recently, I thought it was this month, but in fact it was in April. Time has little meaning here. It was cloudy and rainy and the eclipse wasn't visible at all. This made me think of other eclipses I've seen. I was extremely lucky to be in the zone of totality for a solar eclipse in France in 1999. It was an eerie and powerful experience, the strange semi-darkness, the sudden quiet of birds and animals and all of nature around us, the silence and respect of the other watchers, standing outside, all in our eclipse glasses. I don't know if I have any photos of that eclipse, I ought to check. I found some photos I took of a partial solar eclipse on 10 June 2021, so perhaps it was that memory making me think the recent one was in June too.

First I projected it onto a sheet of white card. Look very closely and you can see the white dot of the sun. To the right is the nappy box that I also made a pinhole viewer out of.

A little closer, if blurrier, projection of the eclipse.

A not very successful attempt to take a photo through the pinhole viewer. It was very clear and amazing watching the eclipse inside this box, seeing the crescent taken out of the sun. But it was not very possible to capture it with the camera.

And then there is this photo. I don't actually know how I took this. I know I didn't look directly at the sun, I'm not quite that much of an idiot. And I didn't look at the sun in the screen of my digital camera either. I think I looked at the projection on the card and put the camera pointing behind me up at the sun and took some pictures in that general direction without looking at the sun, the camera or the screen.