Galileo

It was the "Great American Eclipse" today, a silly and inauspicious name (perhaps American Greatness has always only ever been the interference pattern of objects we orbit and are orbited by). You can see it in the crescent-shaped green lens flare of my iPhone camera above, close to the 74% obscuring which was the most we got in New York (14:49 EST). But more fun, and safer, was seeing it through the pinhole viewer I made from a meter-long mailing tube: here are the shape near the start (13:51) and near the end (14:54) of the moon's transit across the sun:

Funny story: between taking these pictures from a 4th floor classroom, I went up to the 8th floor balcony where New School administrators and others were passing around some free eclipse glasses. I brought my bazooka-shaped thing, and it eventually grabbed everyone's attention. What is that thing? How does it work? You made it? I don't see anything - wait, now I see it, cool!!! Did anyone notice that it wasn't just a person from the liberal arts college - not the design school - who'd made his own device, but the Religious Studies person who'd brought a telescope?