It's so overcast here that an eclipse wouldn't be very noticeable. Even if it got pretty dark it would just be like a storm was coming. It's rained so much since May that I can't imagine a dry week anymore.
I think the highlight of today has been my co-worker's reactions, they're all middle aged corporate professionals, and they're going up and down the elevator telling everyone else how cool it is. Today has been good, even if it was only a partial eclipse.
I tried using a filter to get a picture of the eclipse. View attachment 266597
It didn't go so well, but it still looks cool. Maybe I did it too early or something.
Alright, the partial eclipse is done on my end. Nothing too mind-blowing, but I walked around and took some pictures and also to hit my quota for a walk this week. While it was still light outside, it looked more like the eight o'clock hour than ten o'clock, and it got dark pretty quick indoors to the point it looked more like it was the evening hours than even a regular cloudy day. Brothers didn't really care, so it was just me.
These are all the pictures I took outside, so enjoy my shitty photography. (And I also just realized the time's wrong on my camera… what the fuck.)
Here's my cat not giving a shit.
First attempts to take a picture of the sun without looking at the camera.
The sprinklers had just finished up when I took these pictures.
lol garden hose puddle
Cat continuing to not give a shit. Went back in to change out my camera's batteries after these.
Clouds started coming in. Fuck you clouds.
My glasses are supposed to get dark in the sunlight. They don't really work too well to begin with, but this was the best they could do at about the maximum. (Looked more purple on the camera than on the computer lol shit.)
Another view of the clouds--wait a second.
Holy shit they actually looked like that during a partial eclipse. I had never seen that before.
And since the eclipse was basically ending, these devolved into nothing more than nature pics.
It was cloudy where I was and I wasn't sure what time it was happening out. Couldn't tell if the sun was out or if it was just the clouds, so the lack of glasses meant I felt I couldn't really experience it. Oh well.
Because you can't acclimate that rapidly. You will look directly at the sun and not be able to see anything at all because you're blinded. Also you can accidentally get sunburn on your retina. So it's nearly pointless to try.
The warnings about staring at the sun during an eclipse are a bit overblown. They make it sound like the sun magically turns into a giant monster shooting lasers directly into your eyes if you look at it. It doesn't. It's putting out the same amount of UV as it usually does, but just like if you dumbly stared at it during normal times, yes, you will get retinal sunburns and maybe go blind if you stare directly at it whether or not there's an eclipse.
While "don't stare directly into the sun you stupid fucker" is an obvious rule of living, it's just that the only time people really even do that is during an eclipse where staring at the sun is a thing people are doing. It's just that usually the sun is so goddamn bright you actually just don't stare directly at it anyway. Because you have this thing called pain and it says stop doing that. During an eclipse, the light is greatly reduced, so dumb people will stare at it.
A kind teacher loaned me a pair of glasses so I got to stare at near totality for about 20 seconds. For the rest, I just used a pinhole camera made out of a shoe box.
