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It Came From Outer Space

Photos of Sunday’s Annular Eclipse: The Ring of Fire

by Susana Polo | 10:17 am, May 21st, 2012


As many of you have no doubt gathered, The Mary Sue is a blog based on the east coast of the United States, and a such we are all very jealous of the western US and Pacific areas who got treated to a gorgeous annular eclipse this weekend. What’s an annular eclipse? Well, it’s a certain kind of solar eclipse, i.e., one where the moon passes between the Earth and the Sun, and casts its shadow on the Earth’s surface. Now, the Moon is way, way smaller than the Sun, and even though it’s also way, way closer to the Earth than the Sun, it still takes a lot of celestial synergy to get that rarest of eclipses: the full solar eclipse. More often, we get partial solar eclipses. An annular eclipse is one where the moon passes fully between the Sun and Earth, with the entirety of its disc covering our view of the Sun… but not our entire view of the sun. The Moon still appears smaller than the Sun in the sky, and so at the peak of its coverage, it is outlined on all sides by the Sun, appearing as a dark disc on the face of the star, surrounded by a ring of fire.

Space.com and Reddit’s Tokyo users have offered a number of striking pictures of the event.

Okay, I admit it, I’ve never managed to actually remember how pin-hole projectors for eclipse viewing work for more than five minutes after it is explained to me. So I can’t explain how the light from an eclipse, seen through the shadows of some leaves, could do stuff like this. But I know it’s cool.

Apparently, collanders also work:

First and last pictures from Reddit, all others from Space.com.

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  • http://twitter.com/diefrankenmaus Kate

    FFFSSSSSSS. East cost always gets screwed when it comes to celestial events :(. 

  • Anonymous

    And to think that eclipses in the past changed history and civilizations…

  • Anonymous

    I’m confident if I look hard enough I would find a version of this graphic with captions reading “Superpowers”, “Enhanced Abilities”, “Random effects” and “SOL”

  • http://www.facebook.com/jocelynplease Jocelyn Dugan

    The really embarrassing part of this is, I live on the East Coast (sadly, not affiliated with the MS) and had no idea of the eclipse and kept looking out the window thinking the Twitter-verse had gone crazy because it was night time and so, impossible for a solar eclipse.

  • Anonymous

    I watched it on Slooh last night, it was awesome!

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