It would be hard to guess what this image was all about without the expanation. It left we clueless, as not something that I had ever seen before.
I’ve seen this phenomenon, and it’s REALLY cool. Partial eclipses can be sort of anticlimactic, especially if you don’t have any safe viewing apparatus handy, but seeing the little semicircle shadows is a unique experience.
like Paul (and Carol) I had seen it before…it still took a bit
'course me memory is improving with age
what’s good 'cause getting worse
wasn’t much of an option
The other cool thing about partial eclipses is that the shadows become sharper – primarily in one direction, though. The last significant one we had down here, I actually did a knife-edge test. Literally. I took out a long knife, held it about 6 feet above the ground, and looked at the sharpness of the shadow along the long and short dimensions of the sun. As expected, it was sharper with the edge along the long dimension of the sun. Of course, most real things don’t lie along an axis of the sun, so shadows are in general sharper.