Oh!  Dudes!  I totally forgot about making a solar eclipse post!  Well, I took pictures, so I gotta post about it.

October 23rd was an ordinary day until one of my coworkers mentioned there would be a partial solar eclipse that afternoon.  I got all excited.  I’ve had the chance to witness a couple partial solar eclipses in my life, but never had the proper equipment to do it with.  Sure, when I was younger we did the box with a paper and pinhole, but in my opinion it didn’t work.  I didn’t know how we would manage to see this one, until that same coworker mentioned going to the prop shop and borrowing the dark glass out of the welder’s helmets.  It protects their eyes from white hot flame, so it should work for the sun, right?

We ran over to the shop and grabbed two pieces of the glass.  Other people had the same idea and had almost wiped the guy out of his stock of them, but there was enough left for us.  We checked the sun at that point to make sure we weren’t missing anything since the timing was ambiguous on the internet sites we checked earlier.  Nothing had happened yet, so we were good.

When the time arrived, about 3:30, we gathered the guys in the main VFX room and all went out to get a look at the solar eclipse.

Here’s a bunch of us at work gathered around looking through the welder’s glass.  My hubby’s the one in front holding the glass.

Selfie of me looking at the sun.

We could see the eclipse fantastically with those welder’s shields.  In fact, we could see it so well some of the guys started trying to take pictures of it with their phones through the glass and their cameras.  Most of them weren’t terribly successful, but they inspired me to run grab my camera and do the same.

Here’s what it looked like with the auto settings. Doesn’t look like much.

Here it is at the manual settings with speed 1/200. Much better!

Well, eclipses aren’t speedy things, so we wandered back inside for a while.  I came back out later when the eclipse was at its peak and took more pictures.

This is what it looked like at about 4:24.

I didn’t like the glow and realized I could up my speed even further on my camera, so I tried again. This is speed 1/1,250. And hey, what’s that dark thing we see? I zoomed in all the way for another picture.

Hey look! Sunspots! How cool is that? I love my camera.

I have now decided that no eclipse should go unseen in my life, and I need some of that welder’s glass for myself.  My children and friends will get to see eclipses in style!