Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

Yesterday morning, I was up early enough for the Day Jobbe that was able to catch the lunar eclipse on the back end.

( Wrong Tool for the Job )

After the brief snap of the eclipse, I got back inside and got to work. It was cold and promised to get colder, with snow on the way. After I got off work (around 1 PM), I decided it was time to get the fireplace going for the first time this season.

( Light It Up )

It took a few hours, as the first fire usually does, but by and by the living room started to warm up sufficiently that the feeling came back into my fingers. I try to keep the thermometer in the living room about 20°C or so. Also, I can now set a kettle of water on the stove so that anytime I want a hot drink, I can do so. I celebrated this by having my first hot chocolate of the season later. When the snow started falling that afternoon, I settled in, happy to have a warm fire going.

After I wrote my previous entry, we got a brief break in the clouds that let us get a look at the lunar eclipse last night.

( Wrong Tool for the Job )

After about ten minutes, the clouds rolled back in and that was all for the night. A couple of hours later, it started to snow lightly. When I woke up this morning, there was maybe 1 cm of snow accumulated. It kept snowing throughout the morning. But nothing would stick. It's been snowing for hours, but it's all melting when it hits the ground.

One good thing about my working hours was that I was up at an hour suitable for watching today's total lunar eclipse. Lisa saw more than I did, as she didn't get any sleep last night and was up and about when it started. I could only get some brief looks, because my work day was starting when totality hit, but I did manage to get to see it at totality, about halfway past totality, and near the end just before the moon set and the sun rose. I didn't embed any of the photos because frankly they aren't very good. The camera phone is not at all suited for these kinds of pictures. Possibly if we'd had the Sony out there on a tripod and played with the settings we could get something worth sharing. Still, this "super blue blood moon" was nice to watch. Clouds that had obscured the start of the eclipse had mostly cleared by the time I was there, so unlike our last lunar eclipse, we actually got to see it.

After the moon set and the eclipse ended, Lisa, who had been up all night, went to bed and I got back to work. At the moment, Lisa and I have deeply out-of-synch hours, seeing each other at "shift change."

Lisa was ideally placed to watch today's annular eclipse, as the "sweet spot" passed right over Fernley. She created a viewing box with a pinhole in it and tells me that she was able to see the "ring of fire" during the maximum coverage (about 96%). Where I was in San Jose the maximum coverage was less, and my viewing a bit more haphazard. I improvised a pinhole viewer with a piece of cardboard salvaged from the recycle bin. When I first tried it out from my apartment, I saw that initially the sun angle in my window was right, and I projected a disc with a notch cut out of it against my wall.

I then went to the lobby on my floor, where I found three kids trying to figure out how to watch the eclipse. I cautioned them repeatedly about trying to look at the sun and started to wield my impromptu pinhole board, when I realized that the way the blinds and curtains on the third floor lobby were drawn, they were forming a series of pinhole views and you could see the image of the sun projected multiple times. We watched the sun head toward the maximum coverage and I tried to impress upon the kids the rarity of this sight. I don't remember seeing a solar eclipse since (I think) 1993 in Folsom.

As the angle of the sun changed, the lobby no longer had a view of the sun that worked, and I headed outside, where I searched for places where I could project the solar image as the lunar notch moved across it. Belatedly I remembered that I should try to take some pictures, and I quickly ran up to my room to get my new Sony camera that replaced the one I broke at Renovation. In my haste, I forgot to put a memory stick into it, however, and thus I only had a little bit of capacity for photos.

( A few photos from me and from Lisa )

This evening I realized that I'd gotten too much sun (including the long walk I took around Quarry Lakes earlier today, about which more later when I get a chance), because I'm sunburned. Oh, the irony. I hope the sun-relief ointment left over from my return from Australia is still effective.