Eclipse, Storms and Party Hats

Eclipse

We attempted to observe the eclipse that occurred across Indonesia on March 9. We failed. Even the old faithful method using a piece of paper with a small hole to create a copy of the image on a second piece of paper failed.  Perhaps this system doesn’t work if the light has to pass through a window first? Perhaps you can’t be under a roof on an exterior balcony?  Our cameras couldn’t capture it either—no special lens or materials to make one.

We were able to see that the sky darkened somewhat, briefly.

The local news showed “live footage” of the eclipse but the "live" coverage was being streamed from places like Belitung where the eclipse was actually 100%. I wanted to see "live" coverage from this city.

Here the eclipse was expected to reach between 40-90%. I'm not sure about why there was such a range. What’s really odd is that folks from all over town claimed to have seen all sorts of eclipse views (many 100% eclipse)  and posted pictures across social media with “look what I saw” statements. Hmmnm.

Many of you may have seen coverage of the eclipse as good or better than what we saw. However, just in case, I pulled this off the internet somewhere. It illustrates what you might call the “official” eclipse and what it looked like from this city. Note the time count. The eclipse observation time was  brief and nowhere near 100%.

Storms!

We have had some storms of late  and these were tremendous so I had to shoot video. We are probably out of full-blown rainy season now. It's raining only occasionally. You probably will need a desktop or laptop to watch the videos. They might not even appear on some small devices.

Just for fun! We celebrated an event and dressed up for the “Skype party.”Newspaper is useful for so many things!