Solar Eclipse, the Backyard View

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Yesterday afternoon, Robb built what he called "an eclipse thingy" out of a tube of tar paper and a circle of metal that might have been the lid to something once.  We lined this up with the sun, and projected an eclipse-shaped shadow on the wall of our neighbor's garage.  Whoah.....

It didn't take long for us to realize that every bit of dappled sunlight in our backyard was also eclipse-shaped. You've never seen two people more enchanted by shadows.  It was fascinating to watch them change as the eclipse progressed.  At first the shadows had blurry edges, but they sharpened up, and rotated over time.

Mundane objects took on magical properties.  The quality of sunlight seemed very strange to us.  We wondered how pre-literate humans might have interpreted such an occurrence.

I really loved how the entire backyard became an eclipse projector.  (This is probably as nice as our neighbor's garage is ever going to look.  I suppose we'll eventually have to paint it...)

Likewise, I doubt I'll ever see the inside of our chicken coop in quite such a poetic light.

And Robb?  Well, that's another story.  As far as I'm concerned, he actually did hang the moon and the stars.  (Corny?  Sure.  However, I could have made a "heavenly body" joke, and that would have been much worse.)

How about you? Were you able to see the eclipse?  Did you stack up all of your sunglasses to look at the sky?