Eclipse2023

Two poor annular eclipse photos taken Saturday October 14, 2023, around 830 am. out of about 15 taken. This is an inadequate version of the setup I built for the 2017 total solar eclipse in Idaho Falls. Saturday was a 1/5 overcast day, 80 miles north of the "complete" annular eclipse. The sun was mostly obscured by haze and drifting clouds. Too dark to see through eclipse glasses.

Many rainy days before eclipse day. There was no good opportunity to calibrate the setup, or add and tweak the projector lens, which would have displayed a 4 inch image rather than a half inch image. Without an hour of calibration on a cloudless day, the projector lens would have been worse than useless ... and the image quite dim.

BUT ... with the box and the single lens in front, we DID see the crescent, with the Moon shadow cutting into the Sun image starting in the upper right of the projected image, then moving towards the lower right.

We might have seen more after a 100 mile trip down I5 to south of Eugene, or a 350 mile trip to south-central Oregon. With project deadlines, rainy weather, and potential traffic jams, not worth it. Plenty of youtube videos to watch instead.

<--- Google map capture of Ridgewood Park. Click attachment "paperclip" for a larger image.

The central red dot is where my wife Char and I took the photos above. This is a tennis court atop a large tall water storage reservoir, the tallest and least obscured place within 3 miles of our house. There is one tall tree southeast of that spot, which blocked the Sun soon after last contact.

History note: The red dot in the upper left of the map is the apartment where I lived with my mother Cathy and sister Lori during high school, 1968-1971. My newspaper route (for college tuition money, plus many other jobs to earn same) was that apartment complex, the offices and stores to the north, another apartment complex northwest of the photo, and the entire Ridgewood neighborhood to the east. The 217 freeway was still under construction, and Ridgewood Park was still undeveloped woodland.