This evening around 6:30 there was a rare annular eclipse of the Sun which was visible in Northern California. According to Professor Marcy at UC Berkeley an annular eclipse is “when the Sun, Moon, and Earth are lined up, but the Moon is farther than average from Earth, so it looks a bit too small to fully cover the Sun. Thus, if you are at one of the right places, the Sun will form a ring, or annulus, around the Moon. It’s a special, fun form of a partial solar eclipse.”

So naturally, living in Northern California, I ran outside with my camera and some filters to use that would allow my camera to capture this astronomical event. Sadly I only caught the tail end of it but the results where still intriguing. The odd colors of the photos are not naturally emitted colors from the sun but simply the colors of the filters I used, disappointing I know.

Oh and to those wondering: no I did not look right at the eclipse. I switched the view finder on my camera to the screen and then just held up the camera and took these shots.

The filter also caused some interesting bokken like effects causing multiple images of the eclipse to be displayed.

I want to give another thanks to Professor Marcy for the heads up about this great event and the great information about it as well.