sun

Today I saw my first solar eclipse. It’s tough to convey how exciting it was for me; I was thoroughly geeking out. Just look at that crescent and remind yourself that it’s an unfathomably huge, seething sphere of gas and energy that’s being obscured by a much smaller, but no less beautiful, sphere of rock and cold. How cool is that?

You can also barely see a massive sunspot moving across the Sun’s “southern” surface. It’s about the size of Jupiter. Sunspots are regions of particularly intense magnetic activity, and they only look dark compared to the rest of the Sun; they’re still plenty bright.

I always like to think of eclipses from the perspective of people 2,000 or 10,000 or 50,000 years ago. What would you think if you saw the light of the sky dimming, or going out as during a total eclipse? I’d think the world was ending. I wonder how terrifying it was. Or maybe ancient people were more relaxed than I suspect. Either way, I wonder.

It was a really lovely evening here. I spent most of the day nervous that the clouds wouldn’t get out of the way in time. They broke just enough to let me see the Sun through their filter — perfect. A few other creatures joined me to see it.

Beautiful all around. I’m looking forward to the total eclipse coming in 2017.

Thanks for looking,

Dan

A little slow this week, and more focused on composition than moments. But getting a bit more abstract is fun, too, and the message or point stays the same: relationships. It’s nothing at all earthshaking, but I’ve realized recently that, with all of my photos, I’m trying to show relationships — links, friendly or otherwise, between people and the things they build or find. Despite being intense, ambulatory little worlds, people are often very small compared to those things. I like pointing that out.

But like I said, relationships. What we call a moment could be defined as as an arrangement that shows us something about one of those relationships. I’ve been looking at photos this way for a few weeks.

Anyway, thanks for looking, and I hope you’re enjoying some of the warmth.