Okay, so ordinarily outreach astronomy isn’t my jam.  I just really don’t have a bent toward teaching, though I am ever grateful for all those out there who do.  But this recent Annular Eclipse had an interesting confluence of events for me that made me realize again that, of all of the sciences, I’m grateful my path took me to Astronomy.

I do think that Astronomy is super great.  It’s also a lot more accessible than you might expect, both because it’s extremely cross disciplinary, and because it does have a long history of public outreach efforts aimed at making it accessible.  AND also because a lot of the principles and context (and sometimes events!) do intersect with our daily lives.

(Astronomy is a great topic of study if you want to be able to answer your kid when they ask why the sky is blue – or, the other day for me, when my younger daughter asked why the night sky is black…she’s at the age where she knows enough to sometimes get herself turned around backwards.)

Anyway.  There was an annular eclipse very recently (Saturday, Oct.14^th 2023), which I had been aware about both from the news and because it had come up as something some folks needed to be aware of at my work.  Where I live, we were only going to get 80% maximum coverage, but even full coverage on an annular eclipse doesn’t black out the Sun entirely, because it happens when the Moon (which is in a slightly elliptical orbit around the Earth) is far enough away that it appears too small to fully cover the disk of the Sun.

I wasn’t paying too much attention to it, because we had a lot of family-schedule stuff that day and I was out running errands at the time of maximum.  But when I got home my husband handed me some of our old eclipse glasses from the 2017 eclipse (oof – six years ago?) and I got to see the nice partial eclipse that was still happening.  I also had a nice little run-in with a neighbor who was walking his dog and showed me a picture he’d taken on his phone during maximum where the sun was still too bright to see the moon shadow, except in one of the lens-flare reflections, which showed a nice, clear crescent shape.  After looking with the old eclipse glasses, I ran inside to grab a piece of paper and a safety pin to also do the pin-hole experiment, because I hadn’t actually tried that the last time we’d got to see an eclipse.

Now, I hope a lot of you already know about the pin-hole experiment you can do during an eclipse, because it’s super easy and accessible and a fun way to interact with a celestial event that can often be hard to see if you’re not in the right place with the right equipment.  You can also do it with dappled sunlight coming through the trees, but a piece of paper and a pin to poke a hole is the very simplest.  This is related to something called a pin-hole camera, which in theory you can do with any bright view, but because so little light gets through the pinhole, usually you have to have the image show up in, say, a really dark room, so that the faint image is visible.  The idea is that, because the light from the image all has to pass through that one spot where the pinhole is, that the hole itself acts like a lens, and you get an actual, clean image out the other side.  It’s handy with the Sun, because the Sun is so bright that to see the actual shape of it you want less light, otherwise the rods and cones in your eyes, or the pixels in your camera, will all saturate and it will just be a big, bright blur.  For my pinhole, I grabbed a white sheet of paper and tore it in half so that one half had the hole poked in it that the Sun shone through, and the other half was on the ground to catch the image inside the shadow of the first half.  You have to play with angling it a little.  (And of course I don’t have a picture of the setup (me kneeling on the ground holding paper) because, again, I don’t usually think in terms of teaching stuff.)

Okay, anyway.  That was fun, to get a chance to do this quick, easy experiment I hadn’t got to try before.  And it was also fun to see the eclipse crescent of the Sun showing up in the dappled light falling through my tree onto the sidewalk.  That I did get a picture of.  From a distance, it made me imagine that the shadows looked like they were painted onto the sidewalk by someone painting in an impressionist style, a black-and-white Monet on my sidewalk.

But, the reason I’m writing this post is because of the conversation I had with my husband and a guest we had over for dinner later that evening.  We’re all in the physical sciences.  I’ve got my degree in Astronomy, my husband in Optics, and our friend was his lab-mate in grad-school and is now a college Physics professor.  I asked her about her own eclipse viewing for the day and whether she’d had a chance to try the pinhole, since I’d had fun with that.  And my husband spoke up and said he hadn’t actually known about the pinhole experiment until very recently.  And I was very surprised.  I said, ‘But you must have known about pinhole cameras?  That’s a common idea for introductory Physics classes.’  But now our friend was shaking her head.  She said, ‘No.’  She said that as a hard-nosed, pure Physics major, she (and apparently also my husband) had really gotten only the purely math-based version of…everything physics when they were in undergrad.  She said she’d recently revised the physics-major curriculum at her college to include a chance to do fun, accessible experiments like that, but that her school hadn’t included them in the curriculum for majors before that.

Honestly, I still feel a little befuddled about this.  And I think I have to chalk it up, in part, to some of the great privilege that comes with studying astronomy.

Astronomy is a hard science (vs ‘soft’, not versus ‘easy’).  And sometimes there’s a stupid mental hierarchical ranking that gets done, where pure physics is at the ‘top’ and sub-disciplines within Astronomy get shuffled around vying for which fall closest below that and are more ‘hard science’ (math-based) than the others, and…whatever.  But almost nobody’s going to try to deny that Astronomers, of whatever stripe or math-y-ness, are dreamers.  And we openly acknowledge and celebrate the fact that Astronomy is a popular science, that it catches the imaginations of all sorts of folks that otherwise maybe don’t interact with science at all.

As a result, all those accessible labs and fun thought experiments are already baked into a lot of the Astronomy curriculum, whether you learn it in your intro classes, or when you’re a new grad student and in charge of a lab section.  I can look at converging slots in a fence line and think of beat notes in a wave pattern.  I can explain to someone that their ability to catch a thrown ball means that they already have a fundamental understanding of how gravity works, including some of the complicated nuances.  And when there’s an eclipse I can run to grab what I need to make a fun little pinhole ‘camera’.

And, I guess I took for granted that everyone who studied physics had access to this really fun side of things.  That the things they were studying and dreaming about were reflected back at them in the world that’s already around them.  And that they could tie their complicated stuff, if they wanted to, to more mundane things that a friend or acquaintance or stranger on the street might already know and be able to get.  Not everything maybe, but that there are nifty gateways.

And this, round and round about, ties back around to what I like about genre fiction, too, like fantasy.  STORY, and the life lessons and insight that Story can impart, can be a weighty, serious thing.  Just like SCIENCE can be something that people take very seriously.  But it can also be wrapped up in something fun and imaginative and approachable.  And that doesn’t make it less true and important.  It just makes it more fun and approachable.

I’m not called to teach, but I love learning.  And learning should be fun.  Everyone should get to have access to learning that is fun, that introduces us to joy and wonder.  Like lucky me, doing astronomy.

So, if you want to try the pinhole camera, even though there isn’t an eclipse right now, then find a bright light source (an exposed lightbulb or a flashlight), cover part of it with something in a recognizable shape (like a paper circle covering one side).  Get two pieces of paper, one with a hole poked in (with a straight pin or safety pin; it has to be a small hole) and put them as far from your half-covered light as you can reasonably get them.  And play with the shadow of the paper with the hole.

And, for those of you hoping for pictures of the Moon and Sun in eclipse, here are some pictures of that, courtesy of my husband.