Photo: Blakely Harbor during the partial eclipse taken by a camera set at an exposure for normal daylight.
We were anchored in Blakey Harbor, across Puget Sound from Seattle, waiting for the partial eclipse to start.
Steve held his arc welding glass up to the sky and peered at the sun. "It's starting! I can see the moon sliding across the sun." He handed the glass to me and I saw a small black notch taken out of the sun. (Arc welding helmets are not the same as gas welding goggles; glass for arc welding helmets are manufactured to protect from a much more intense light.)
The Eclipse would be 92% here, but how much different would it look?
I couldn't take a picture of the sun in eclipse because I didn't have the right filter for my camera. Puzzling over how to use the camera to show some aspect of the eclipse, I got the idea of taking pictures of Blakely Harbor itself, but with the camera always set manually to the same exposure throughout the eclipse.
When a camera is set on automatic, it takes a "normal" exposure, meaning the picture will be averaged to 22% gray. If I left my camera on automatic throughout the eclipse, all the pictures would look pretty much the same, except for differences in focus or the amount of camera shake. For each photo, the camera would choose the exposure that produced an average of 22% gray, increasing the exposure time and/or opening the aperture wider as the eclipse deepened, then closing the aperture or decreasing the exposure time as the eclipse passed its maximum.
Our eyes were doing something similar to a camera set on automatic. As the sun darkened, our pupils were widening, compensating for the darkness. I saw some darkening, but nothing like what my camera showed each time I took a picture. Steve claimed I was imagining things; he could see no darkening. He did acknowledge that the shadows appeared darker. Perhaps I had benefited by being trained as a photographer.
So my eclipse blog is more about cameras and human eye than the sun and moon. See the series of photos I took on Flickr:
(Eclipse from Blakely Harbor)