A total solar eclipse passed over our house yesterday. It was so delightful. The eclipse was objectively beautiful, and I spent all day engineering science projects with which to enjoy it. I wasn’t overcome with wonder, like the eclipse we chased seven years ago.

My husband has mentioned eclipse chasing twice… and I’m wondering if that will be in my future. Iceland in 2026, North Africa in 2027, Australia in 2028. We shall see!

The day started with analyzing weather radar and amateur future-telling. After I decided to not try to drive to Indianapolis, I assisted my daughter in making eclipse pancakes.

Chocolate and Regular pancake batter dribbled in eclipse shapes: 7 plates ranging from sun half covered to bailey's beads, to diamond ring, to totalality

Birdsong

After it was too late for our first eclipse, I heard that birds and animals quiet down like they’re freaked out. Or maybe just like it’s nighttime. So I set up an iPad to watch out a back, upper window and record birdsong. I don’t detect a volume drop with my ears, and it’s going to be difficult to measure, because my family and I were really loud. You can hear our voices echoing around the neighborhood. Sorry neighbors.

Using an online sound meter, I tested the level of the birdsong playing from the iPad into my Macbook. While I don’t think the absolute measure of loudess is accurate (the birdsong probably did not get up to 85 decibels, as my chart shows), I do believe the relative sound levels are mostly accurate. Things were a little quieter during totality, but I believe that’s due to cars not driving during those two minutes. And it’s hard to know because there wasn’t many seconds where we weren’t shouting.

Minute Decibel
10 84
20 85
35 79
37 78
40 80
50 84
60 75
70 84

I am certain, though, that at least a few birds kept singing the entire time. I think that if you just played the audio of birdsong, a person would not be able to tell you if it was during the eclipse or not.

Crescent dappled shadows

Light filtering through trees shows in patches. But during an eclipse, those patches become cresents, like nature made its own pinhole camera. I pointed Erika’s desktop computer out the window and left the screen open for seventy five minutes. Here is the five second condensed version on YouTube.

Pinhole camera

I’m proud of my pinhole camera. I lined the inside and outside with black paper, padded the eyepiece, replaced the pinhole area with aluminun foil and pricked it with the tip of the smallest needle I could find. In retrospect covering over the “Crispy Oats” packaging also would have been advisable.

cereal box turned pinhole camera children looking through pinhole camera

Pinhole array

I wanted to make another pinhole device, but this time as an array, like people achieve in eclipses with colanders. After setting up an elaborate structure out of bricks, and umbrella, a blanket, and a shoebox–that I had to rotate every thirty minutes to face the sun–I realized that I had just recreated the pinhole camera. Apparently the earth rotates and your viewer needs to track it.

I did set up an iPad to film the array, so here is the condensed version. You can see the cresent migrate across the screen, then go dark, then flip.

shoebox/brick structure shoebox/brick structure with blanket blocking sun 9 crescents 9 crescents 9 crescents 9 crescents

Solar Glasses Camera

I had heard it was a bad idea to just take a picture of the eclipse with a camera, for fear of ruining it. I didn’t know if this was misinformation, so I didn’t take a picture with a camera that was important to me. Instead, I booted up my old phone and taped a solar glass lens to the camera and set it filming. The video from this one was not interesting.

phone on the ground wearing solar glasses, near crescent shaped dappled leaf patterns

Shadow Bands

Austin heard about Shadow Bands somewhere, and he spent some time researching it. He insisted on appropriating one of my devices to try to catch it on film. By the time they should have happened, the sun moved behind a tree and so the crescent shaped shadows of the branches were indiscernable from any shadow bands that could have been there. Next time (eclipse chasing, anyone?) I’ll get a larger white sheet and make sure there will be no trees blocking the sun for the next few hours.

a child's shoe, while he turns on the camera

But my friend Rydge was able to catch them. It looks like aliasing, like an artifact from the interactions of the recording and displaying devices. But he said it looked like that in real life. He also said to drop a like and a subscribe.