Among many of the things I had wanted to post to JSVB but didn't in time were some entries on the solar eclipse of August 21st, 2017. Many of my friends went to great lengths to travel to the United States to view the full eclipse. My wife and I had the day off, but we stayed home and watched the partial eclipse which maybe is less exciting and not much to post about.
Not willing to shell out money for proper eclipse glasses, but also unwilling to sear our retinas, we chose to view the eclipse indirectly. The hole made by a pin through a piece of paper is a sufficient lens to project an image of the sun onto a screen. This much I recalled from grade school science; I was half my height and a quarter of my current weight the last time there was a significant eclipse of the sun where I lived.
My wife found the materials we needed to make a pinhole lens viewer. She took an old packing tube and poked a hole at one end and covered the other with paper. She carved a viewing port in the side. I christened it the Science Bong 600. When you line the Bong up with the sun, you see the solar image image in the viewport. The lunar occlusion changes the apparent shape of the sun projected on the screen as you can see above.
In retrospect, I should have painted and decorated the Science Bong 600, but all of the weather forecasts for the day called for clouds and rain. My wife quickly built the Bong prototype when it turned out the forecasts were all wrong and we were blessed with a clear view.
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