Ad Astra Observatory

I have to say that, as a rule, I’m generally not into transient astronomical phenomena. The fact that I can observe and photograph the same, unchanging objects year after year is very calming for me.

So I’m not the person to ask about the latest meteor shower, comet, or eclipse. I’m often out of the loop, because I don’t spend a lot of time studying the whens and wheres of these things.

As a result, I learned about the May 20, 2012 solar eclipse while reading the list of “Things to Bring to Maker Faire”, and the timing of the eclipse was intriguing, as I knew I would be on a plane at the time, so I decided to see what I could see. I mean, really. Decent eclipse, visible from the west coast of the US, and I was going to be above the clouds at the time? It’s like kismet.

I confirmed that our seats (by happenstance) were on the west side of the plane. And I made myself a pinhole viewer with a barf bag; they come with a twisty, which provided some small-gauge wire to poke the paper with. A few folds of the edge of the bag to get it to stick in the window, and I was off and running.

Lens: pinhole
Camera: iPhone
Location: seat 38C of some 757 or another

Here is a sampling of what I captured (times are approximate, I’ll try to get more metadata off the photos once I get them properly loaded):

And here is another photo of the same event, from an undisclosed ground-based location:

OK, so I have to admit that the eclipse was pretty cool. It’s not something that I would go chasing across the globe or anything, but every once in awhile, the astronomy gods hand you something on a silver platter, and so, humbly, I accept.