It’s uncanny and special for someone to be looking the other way during an eclipse.
It’s so short and a rare enough even that would make earth a tourist hotspot for extraterrestrials if there ever was interplanetary tourism.
It’s uncanny and special for someone to be looking the other way during an eclipse.
During the two minutes of totality I tried really hard to take in as much as I possibly could. The light was very weird the entire time and because I wasn’t looking at the sun and moon when it happened, I saw the weird wavey shadow things as totality ended. Absolutely incredible experience and I highly recommend everyone experience it at least once in their life!
The reason this happens is because the tiny gaps between the leaves act as lenses, like in a pinhole camera.
A pinhole camera has no lens. The effect here is like a pinhole camera, but a pinhole camera is nothing at all like a lens. Pinholes diffract light. Lens refract light.
EDIT: Of course you can’t resolve an image through diffraction. That’s not how pinholes cameras work. Diffraction negatively impacts image resolution, but it absolutely happens when light passes through them. But, although lens do use refraction to resolve an image, that same process also has unintended negative effects on image resolution (spherical aberration, chromatic aberration, etc.). I didn’t bring up any of that because it was ultimately a distraction from the important part: narrow gaps diffract light, lens refract light, and pinhole cameras do not work like lens.
Pinholes diffract light.
The diffraction effects from a pinhole camera are not what make them work. In fact, diffraction makes the photographs worse than they otherwise would be. The pinhole makes an effective aperture for photography because it’s small size produces small circles of confusion on the film plane. Ideally, you would make the hole as small as possible, but beyond a certain (small) size, defraction becomes the dominant source of blurring. So the size of the pinhole should be chosen to yield the best balance between geometric blur and diffraction blur.
The diffraction is merely a limit to the smallness of the aperture, and not what creates the image.
The diffraction effects from a pinhole camera are not what make them work.
I didn’t say this, you did. You’re chasing your own tail.
