Xavier's First Solar Eclipse
Greetings to everyone.
Today was a big event for us: a solar eclipse. I had not paid much attention to it; I thought the full dark band was passing through Denver. Well, not so much. We had 92.6% of it. Not too impressive, but still fun.
When we learned that Wyoming was the place to be to see the full blackout, Rebecca and I spent hours trying to find reservations. We exhausted Wyoming hotels and camp grounds, even tried scenarios of flying into Idaho. We even looked at Nebraska. Apparently, hundreds of thousands of others were more prepared for this day than we were. We did find one tiny hotel room for $600.00 a night. That was too much to pay.
So, this morning when Xavier got up, he and I built an eclipse viewer out of a Cheerios cereal box. We took it outside and tested it. Our first design needed a refinement (a smaller pinhole). We made the corrections and set it aside to wait for the eclipse to begin.
Xavier asked what we were doing. So, I took him downstairs and found my Earth globe and my Moon globe. I demonstrated to him what solar eclipse was using the ceiling light as the sun. He grasped part of it, but discovered he liked spinning the Earth globe more than listening to the science lesson.
Oh well, I thought. We have another one in seven years, and he'll be eleven then.
As it turned out, Xavier got far more excited than I thought. He got into the viewing of the eclipse and understood what was happening. We abandoned our cereal box viewer as its projection proved too blurry. With the two 3x5 cards, we were able to adjust the the distance to get sharp shadows.
We plan on being far more prepared come April 2024. We plan on being in the dark band. 2017 was our dry-run test for it!