I just don’t get it
In: Earth Science
So interestingly enough, this isn’t earth science at all, it’s optics.
You may have heard of a pinhole camera, or camera obscura before (google for images) Essentially you have a scene in front of you, a small pinhole, and either a sheet of paper or photo paper to view or record the image.
Imagine your scene is an arrow pointed up. The idea is that a ray of light will come from the bottom of the arrow through the pinhole and onto the top of the paper. Likewise a light ray from the top will go through the pinhole and hit the bottom of the paper. In the end, you get an in-focus, inverse image on your paper, so in this case a down arrow.
So what does this have to do with weird shadows? Well I’m thinking you mean the little crescents you typically see under trees. As leaves flow in the wind, a number of temporary “pinholes” are formed, projecting an inverse image of the eclipse on the ground.
We normally just see rounded blurry “dots” on the ground because the sun is usually round. When it’s not, we see other shapes.
It just hit me that I have never seen a shadow during an eclipse. I looked at the eclipse. Now I wonder what such a shadow would look like…
Latest Answers