2000 Solar Eclipse

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Today is Christmas day, December 25, 2000.

I live in Canton MI, where there has been a partial solar eclipse, and my dad and I have "captured" it from start to finish.

A partial solar eclipse is when the sun's light is partially blocked out by the moon. Where I live there was about a 60% blocking of the sun. In Canada there was about a 70-80% blocking of the sun.

My dad and I have "captured" the eclipse every fifteen minutes from 10:30 a.m.-2:15 p.m. Last year we built a helioscope so we could record sunspots. This was helpful to us because we recorded the eclipse with the same thing but traced in where there appeared to be NO SUN!!

Here are a couple of pictures of our helioscope. Notice the image of the eclipse on the imaging screen.

       

Here are all the tracings after we colored them and put them into an animation to show the moon moving across the sun. Because the images we projected are through what my dad calls an "erecting" lens, the picture is right-side-up instead of the usual upside-down that would appear through a telescope. Along with the moon blocking the sun, you can see the sun spots that were there that day.