This was a cool thing that I had heard of before the Annular Eclipse Trip, but then forgot about, so I was pleasantly surprised to see this. When the light of a partially eclipsed sun goes through a small aperture, it will show a sharp image of the sun on a surface beyond it. This is the pinhole camera effect. Well, this works all the time, not just during eclipse, but when the projections are the circles of a full sun, it’s normal to us and not remarkable. However, when the sun isn’t a circle anymore, it’s a little more attention-grabbing. Even the little spaces between the leaves on a tree acted like pinholes and the tree’s shadow on our RV was sprinkled with tons of crescent sun shapes.
For the next trip, hopefully most of the photography is automated, and we have time to have more fun with this effect. I plan to make some messages out of pinholes in posterboard and photograph the projections. We’ll also try different sized holes, distances, and material thicknesses. If we have a tree nearby, it would be cool to get video of the crescents moving with the wind in the tree.
