Why the glowing crescents? “Well,” explained Husband Dear, “it’s like a pin-hole camera.” Remember those from your school days? A hole in a box will project light from an image onto the back of the box—that is what was happening on our garage. Nature did it. (Rats! No picture.)
Husband Dear had rigged up the binoculars, using one side only, it that an ocular, not a binocular? Anyway that one lens projected an image of the sun onto a white plastic board. As Daughter Darling and I worked on a project on the back deck and Baby Darling played in water and with a bowl of ice cubes—it was a hot day—we watched the movie in the yard.“It looks like Pac Man,” daughter said. The moon moved across the face of the sun until it had formed a crescent. Observing the sun behave in an uncommon fashion gave me a moment of fear, silly, I knew I was observing a natural phenomenon, but guess we are used to nature behaving in prescribed ways—not taking on an eerie glow in the middle of an otherwise sunny afternoon. But then came the dancing shadows on the garage, and what fun.
By now the sun was setting behind the house so Husband Dear moved his apparatus to the driveway, and there we watched the sun slide behind Big Rock Candy Mountain. A silhouette of that mountain was also projected within the ball of the sun, only upside down—a phemononon of lenses.
Faster than a comet—well not that fast, the sun slid behind that mountain, we watched the two shadows—the mountain and the moon—come together until the sun set. Cool, really cool. Husband Dear had the foresight to get one photo.
