Friday, June 1, 2012

Dark

Darkness is simply the absence of light, just as cold is really the absence of heat.  Just as we are not designed to take continuous heat, neither are we designed to be blasted by continuous light.  One of the more interesting paths to darkness is an eclipse such as the solar eclipse that cast it’s shadow in varying degree across Northern California the afternoon of May 20th.

Of course, it is unsafe to view a solar eclipse directly, but if the opportunity ever affords itself to you, simply take a pin and punch a hole in a piece of paper.  This can then be held up allowing what light there is to pass through and be focused on a flat surface.  That is exactly what I did to get this picture of the moon eclipsing the sun as projected onto a brick on the front of our house:

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An even more delightful … hmmm, is it proper to see dark as being de-light? … effect is afforded by light filtering through my neighbor’s tree leaves onto his fence, a plethora of crescents!

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What would life be without its shadows?  Uninteresting at its very best;  deadly overload at its worst.

Please forgive me my tardiness in this Friday Loose Blogger Consortium posting.  Life has been busy lately to say the least.  I think you will also find that other members of the LBC suffer the same fate from time to time.  What you won’t find is uninteresting, so please check the sites linked to on the right side of the page and see what they have to say about this topic.

And please welcome back one of our returning members, Anu!

12 comments:

  1. Without darkness we'd be blinded by the light.......there's a song in there somewhere :-)

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    1. LOL Do you think we should cut a record and act like we were the first to come up with it?

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  2. I really think I was seeing those kinds of shadows in the trees because everything looked strange to me during the eclipse. We did look at it using the pinhole method you described. Don't you wish we could look directly at the sun? I do know some people who used welder's masks. I should try that next time.

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    1. I bet that is what you were seeing, Delirious. My son has a welder's mask and he and his wife watched it with that! I would have liked to look that way, too.

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  3. Absolutely stunning photos. Best was the bubbly one.

    As you said it, Mea Culpa.

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    1. Padmini, I loved the way it looked filtering through the trees! The second picture is taken right at the peak of the eclipse. The projection onto the brick was a bit earlier.

      It really dimmed the light down.

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  4. The second photo is fascinating.

    I remember reading or being told at some stage that we need the darkness to grow - literally. Mind you, in urban western life it is difficult to find true darkness.

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  5. The moon on the brick is very unusual; the crescent photo is fascinating.
    Blessings - Maxi

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    1. Maxi, we were really happy when that developed!

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  6. There is food for some serious thought in that de-leight TOF. Would delight imply that we can have that experience only in the dark?

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    1. It would either seem to imply that - or it could just be an accidental linguistic collision. I need to look at the etymology a little.

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