Solar Eclipse

Eclipse Experience written by Sr. Marie

This Monday, some of the sisters were very excited about seeing the solar eclipse.  We did not have the special solar filter glasses that allow you to look at the sun without damaging your eyes, and had read many warnings about how looking even briefly at the sun can do serious damage to your eyes, so we decided to try a method we had read about called a “pinhole projector”. For this, you poke a pinhole in a piece of paper, and then look at the light from the sun through the hole reflecting on a second sheet of paper. As the moon moves across the sun, you can see this in the reflection on the paper.

We used a cardboard box with a sheet of paper taped over the bottom (after folding in the flaps), hoping that the box would block some more of the light and let us see the reflection on the paper better. We were very disappointed at first when we thought our projector didn’t work, but it turned out that the eclipse hadn’t progressed far enough yet to see, and there was great excitement when we saw the shadow from the moon making a crescent shape on our reflection of the sun.

While we were not in the total eclipse band, it got noticeably darker outside. And although several of the sisters were very tempted to look up, no one went blind from watching the eclipse!