Scott finally gets to see an eclipse of the sun

Well as the title says, I finally got to see an eclipse of the sun this morning. From the best (or one of the best) places on the planet to see it from as well.
Madrid was the only capital city in the path of the eclipse so what a lot of luck for me as well . The image you can see above this writing was taken with my little digital camera at the midpoint of the eclipse. I aimed the camera through a pair of eclipse glasses and it all worked out rather well.
To give you the idea without the eclipse glasses


It was like that to see as well.
If you didn't have the eclipse glasses you wouldn't be able to tell what was going on.
I mean you could tell there was something not right with the light and the temperature seemed to drop a lot, but if you were living in another age that was not the information age, apart from not reading this, you also would not be knowing that you were in the middle of an eclipse, and you would not have eclipse glasses either.
the only way you could tell was by noticing the shadows. the small gaps between leaves act as lots of pinhole cameras, casting lots of crude images of the sun on the ground


Eni was a bit freaked out
I think it was just that he doesn't like being stopped in the park when he can't work out why. - i.e. when it is not because of him.

Anyway it was an amazing experience although there was a bit of a sense of dissapointment that the totality wasn't. I must admit I suffered from it too. I had thought that the ring of sun that was left would have more like a twilight effect, when it was not easy , or in fact impossible to tell when the moon was completely in front of sun, and when it started to move off again.
Only by looking at it through the eclipse glasses.
Just after the point that the moon started it's long slow journey off the face of the sun, (it took an hour or so), I realised that the group of old men nearby in the park didn't have a pair of eclipse glasses between them and in fact had not seen the eclipse at all.

I offered them a go at my pair and reluctantly they took them and had a look.
I mean that they were reticent to take me up on my offer and I had to talk them into it. A genuine once in a lifetime experience and they were like, oh no, it doesn't matter.
I think they were all surprised how much they liked it when they each took a turn to have a gander. It was only a few minutes late so they were looking at something like this.

Still well worth it.
Even with the tradeoff of having to talk to the wild haired unshaven, small dog walking, gidi (foreigner) who was making the offer. I think.