Wow! The solar eclipse over Denver was awesome!
Above, a photo that Becky took of me holding 10-month-old Loyabelle in one arm and, in the other, raised above my head, a 13-year-old piece of welder’s glass that made it possible to show the Sun in otherwise normally-exposed pictures. It worked amazingly well. (See also here, here, here and here.)
Below, a shot of the eclipse as seen through a pair of eclipse glasses, followed by a close-up of the eclipse taken by my camcorder (with its makeshift solar filter system, constructed with masking tape and one-half of a pair of those glasses).
These photos were all taken from the west lawn of the Denver Museum of the Nature and Science, which was packed. It was a great place to watch the action, with lots of stuff for the girls to do (like rolling down the hill, chasing bubbles and wandering through the rose gardens), and we even ran into some friends there. But we very nearly didn’t end up there at all!
With the clock ticking toward the eclipse, and the sky looking increasingly overcast, I decided to abandon our museum plan in favor of a long drive south toward Colorado Springs and Pueblo, where the skies looked clearer on the high-resolution visible satellite with ~2 hours to go. So we got on I-225 South and started heading in that direction — but then, with a clearer view of Denver’s western horizon, we could see that there were sunlit skies beyond the clouds, moving toward us, and I made a snap decision that we should go back to the original plan and go to the museum after all. A good thing, too: it looks like the Springs and Pueblo ended up cloudy, while Denver got a great view! We had a cloudy interlude early in the eclipse, but viewing conditions were awesome for the best part of the show, around maximum eclipse.
More photos:
UPDATE: New blog logo!
P.S. After the jump, my Storify page on the eclipse, saving my tweets & retweets for posterity.