MR. ECLIPSE:

Sunday’s solar eclipse was the 55th seen by Jay Pasachoff. An astronomy professor at Williams College and chair of the International Astronomical Union's Working Group on Eclipses, Pasachoff took a team of observers to New Mexico for this latest show....[More]

MR. ECLIPSE:

Sunday’s solar eclipse was the 55th seen by Jay Pasachoff. An astronomy professor at Williams College and chair of the International Astronomical Union's Working Group on Eclipses, Pasachoff took a team of observers to New Mexico for this latest show.  [Less] [Link to this slide]

NICK OF TIME:

Pasachoff and his entourage had a clear view of the start of the eclipse. But as the moon moved into the center of the sun's disk, clouds created striking patterns around the ring of sunlight....[More]

NICK OF TIME:

Pasachoff and his entourage had a clear view of the start of the eclipse. But as the moon moved into the center of the sun's disk, clouds created striking patterns around the ring of sunlight. "It was completely clear except for about 10 minutes around the [approximately] three minutes of annularity," Pasachoff wrote in an e-mail.  [Less] [Link to this slide]

LOW-TECH:

In Nevada City, Calif., eclipse-watchers projected an image of the sun onto a screen with binoculars as the eclipse proceeded toward annularity....[More]

LOW-TECH:

In Nevada City, Calif., eclipse-watchers projected an image of the sun onto a screen with binoculars as the eclipse proceeded toward annularity. But an even lower-tech solution—using a colander as an array of pinhole projectors—worked remarkably well.  [Less] [Link to this slide]

TREE RINGS:

San Francisco was outside the path of the annular eclipse, but the partial eclipse visible there was still striking. Greg Gomes snapped this photo of solar crescents shining through the gaps in foliage....[More]

TREE RINGS:

San Francisco was outside the path of the annular eclipse, but the partial eclipse visible there was still striking. Greg Gomes snapped this photo of solar crescents shining through the gaps in foliage. "I was totally amazed at the time," Gomes says. "I didn’t know trees could do that!" The dappled shade of a tree is often a good place to safely view an eclipse indirectly—the tiny holes between leaves act as pinhole projectors, casting an image of the sun onto walls or the ground.  [Less] [Link to this slide]

In Nevada City, Calif., a screen of foliage cast numerous images of the annular eclipse across the wall of a house.

PROJECTION SCREEN:

Samia Naccache and Bob Tartar caught the partial eclipse from North Beach, San Francisco, using a clever homemade setup: a square of cardboard with one lens of a tripod-mounted set of binoculars protruding through....[More]

PROJECTION SCREEN:

Samia Naccache and Bob Tartar caught the partial eclipse from North Beach, San Francisco, using a clever homemade setup: a square of cardboard with one lens of a tripod-mounted set of binoculars protruding through. The cardboard cast a large shadow around the image from the single binocular lens, which Naccache and Tartar projected onto a piece of white plastic for safe, indirect viewing. The setup, Tartar reports, "allowed for near perfect focus, with sunspots clearly visible on the 2.5-inch [6.35-centimeter] projected image."  [Less] [Link to this slide]

Dylan McConnell cast a tiny image of the eclipse onto a shingled wall in northern California using his fist as a pinhole filter.

FIRE AND SMOKE:

The transpacific eclipse crossed Japan, including Tokyo, on the morning of May 21, local time, before it was visible in the U.S. West during the evening of May 20....[More]

FIRE AND SMOKE:

The transpacific eclipse crossed Japan, including Tokyo, on the morning of May 21, local time, before it was visible in the U.S. West during the evening of May 20. Flickr-user Keiichi Yasu snapped this photo of a cloud-shrouded sun using a Canon EOS 10D digital camera.  [Less] [Link to this slide]

SKYLIGHT:

Flickr-user Naoki Nakashima shot this striking photo of the eclipse through the cloud cover—and through a gap between buildings. ...[More]

SKYLIGHT:

Flickr-user Naoki Nakashima shot this striking photo of the eclipse through the cloud cover—and through a gap between buildings.  [Less] [Link to this slide]

A DIFFERENT VANTAGE:

The European Space Agency's space weather satellite Proba 2 passed through the moon’s shadow four times as it orbited Earth on May 20....[More]

A DIFFERENT VANTAGE:

The European Space Agency's space weather satellite Proba 2 passed through the moon’s shadow four times as it orbited Earth on May 20. This snapshot from one of those instances shows the moon partially eclipsing the sun from Proba 2's viewpoint.  [Less] [Link to this slide]