Eclipse sick day

Sorry I’ve been so quiet lately! The term is over, and our version of Spring Break has begun — more time for blog posts.

Without any pressing teaching engagements, I’m home sick from work today. Instead of doing what I ought (getting rest, or at least reading my students’ excellent PhD theses), I spent a bit of time this morning trying to photograph the solar eclipse, with a jerry-rigged pinhole camera to make the image. Despite my job title, I’ve never been any sort of observational astronomer, nor much of a photographer, so you’ll have to be content with this picture:

Here in the UK, it was naturally too cloudy to get a good view of the partial eclipse most of the time, so my pictures were all from the very end of its hour and a half of visibility.

Still it’s good to look up every now and then (or, in this case, look down) and remind myself why it is I do what I do (and why you, the taxpayers, pay me to do it).

(The Guardian has a nice animation on the eclipse.)