Solar eclipse...

… but first a name.

Thank you to everyone who voted. My mother was very concerned because her favorite pick was in danger. All you lovely people voted my pen name to be Rena Rockford, and thus I am. (hmm, that almost sound biblical, completely unintentional).

And the winner of my pick-your-prize prize was the fifteenth commenter, Carrie Bastyr! Congratulations Carrie, I’ll be sending you an email soon (if I haven’t already).

So, you can now reach me at DrFaerieGodmother (at) gmail.com if you have burning need to contact me. And again, thank you to everyone who took the time to vote and comment.

But now onto the main event!

I live in Albuquerque, so Sunday night I was treated to a fantastic solar show. It was an annular eclipse (not to be confused with a total eclipse) where 95% of the sun was blocked out by the moon. There will be a total eclipse on the 21^st of August in 2017 (more on that later). I thought I’d share a bit of the experience for those of you who didn’t get to see it for yourself.

First off, it was like everyone decided to throw a tailgate party across the whole city. It was awesome. We chose to go up to the hockey rink because it has a commanding view, and a lovely observation deck. Also, we know the people who play hockey there on Sundays, and it was a great excuse to say “hi.”

If you’ve never been to an eclipse event, pretty much everyone looks like this:

3-y-o in dr. horrible training

And most of the pictures… well, unless you’re good, you aren’t going to get really good pictures. We all tried. And at first we got some fantastic pictures of the sun drowning out the cameras (nope, I’m not showing those), but then I noticed something else in the image.

See, in the image here, that’s a solar flare that happens to be the mirror image of the actual eclipse. It’s an artifact of the lenses in a camera, but it is a shadow of the actual sun, and the stage of the eclipse. I wish I’d realized a little sooner.

So then I took another

And another

(It’s worth noting that the sun is still so bright that it drowns out the camera’s light sensors, and only 5% of it is showing. 5%!!!! That’s crazy bright!).

 

Since the sun was setting for the whole time, we eventually got to see the sun set while still blocked by part of the moon.

And if that wasn’t enough, during totality, the hockey game being played on the ice took a break so all the players could come up and have a look at the eclipse.

Liquid Awesome.

All in all, not a bad afternoon. 

Happy Nerd watched eclipse.