95 is Not 100

By the time I realized that I wanted to see a total solar eclipse, everything was sold out. Even finding approved eclipse glasses turned out to be super difficult. Luckily, I got those in the nick of time. And I consoled myself by saying: It'll still be cool. Atlanta is going to have 95% eclipse. That's close enough to 100%.

I took eclipse day off from work, put an alarm on my phone for maximum eclipse time, and on the afternoon in question, I brought a card table, chair, and laptop onto the front porch. My plan was to keep an eye on the eclipse and write a little while I was waiting.

BTW, no writing was accomplished until after the eclipse.

I soon figured out that my camera was not going to handle the sun, so I taped an extra pair of eclipse glasses over the lens on the phone.  This is what 20-25% eclipse looked like through the filter of the glasses.

The right hand side was where the eclipse was. I don't know what happened to the left side in the picture, but it was there to see with the naked eye.

Sadly, my glasses over the lens trick failed as we approached our maximum coverage. The camera just registered red from the glasses and no sun. Oh, well, I thought. At least at 95% I should get a halfway decent shot. I was thinking of all those partial pictures I'd been seeing and totally forgetting to factor in the special camera lenses those photographers had no doubt been using.

As my max coverage approached, I took my chair off the porch and onto the front sidewalk. And then I tried to take pictures again. Looking at the results, I can see why the experts had been warning people not to look at the sun without special glasses on. This picture (below) is 95%, and you'd never know it.

Looks like the full sun, doesn't it? You'd never know that only the tiniest of crescents was visible at this moment.

I'd expected twilight levels of light. Didn't happen. The crickets did come out for a while and start chirping away. The light was odd, not quiet what you'd see when it was cloudy, but impossible to describe in any other way. Maybe if you imagined the light traveling through an odd filter.

I'm not sure if you can see how odd the light is in this shot or not, but there we are.

The experience was way cool and I enjoyed the hell out of it, but ultimately it was disappointing. Do you think hotels are taking reservations yet for 2024?

A 9th Planet?

I don't know if you've been following science news or not, but in the last week or so, astronomers at Caltech have said there's evidence suggesting there's a large ice giant orbiting our sun as the 10th 9th planet. (Sorry, I still think of Pluto as a planet. The ironic thing is that one of these astronomers is the guy who killed Pluto.)

How cool is this? Now granted, it hasn't been spotted yet, and until it's in the cross hairs of someone's telescope, it's theoretical only, but still...

A 10,000 year orbit? That boggles the mind!

And it makes me think of Zechariah Sitchin's work, The 12th Planet. I'm not a big Sitchin fan--I think he got too much wrong to take him seriously--but he did talk about this planet that has this huge orbit around the sun and about the anunnaki who live there. Hearing that there's possibly this planet out there that at least generally fits the information Sitchin gave in his book has me going OMG, what if he was right despite the mis-translations of Sumerian?

Sorry, the part of me that loves to write (and read) SF romance is all excited about the possibilities here. Um, anyway, I'm seriously looking forward to astronomers studying the sky, trying to get their telescopes on this planet and prove it really does exist. How cool would that be? We might have lost Pluto, but we might gain a new, larger planet in his place.

Small Pleasures

I actually had an interesting topic occur to me--at least I assumed that others besides me would find it interesting--but I ran out of time this morning and now I'm at the Evil Day Job (EDJ), so I can't spend a lot of time writing a post. So I'll save this idea for when I do have time and talk about something quicker today.

The lunar eclipse last night was cool! I tried to take pictures, and while I did get some early on, once we reached totality, there wasn't enough light reflecting off the moon for the camera to see. So the viewfinder screen was completely black even though I could see the moon with my eyes. Did I ever mention that once upon a time I wanted to be an astronomer?

One of the guys at the EDJ asked me if I'd gone outside to watch the eclipse. Yeah, right. It was -2 with the wind chill yesterday when I left work--there was no way I was going outside.

Yesterday I also had the broom vac I ordered show up! I'm hugely excited about this, which I find really ironic. I used to work with a woman who bought a new vacuum cleaner and she waxed on and on about it for 45 minutes. At that time, I thought, who gets that excited about a household appliance? I get it now.

Anyway, I wanted the broom vac for quick clean-ups. It's kind of cumbersome to haul out the big vacuum all the time, but because it's winter in MN, I have all kinds of grit in my laundry room. This is where I go in and out of the house from the garage and the grit is from sand they lay down in the parking lot to help with traction. Now I'll just be able to grab the broom vac, do a quick clean up, and get that grit off my floor!

It has to charge for 24 hours, so I'll see how well it does on the clean up when I get home tonight. Fingers crossed that I love it.