Categories
Home experiments Observations

Viewing an eclipse, the coffee way

NASA image of annular eclipse from space
A different perspective? This is the view looking towards Earth of the 2017 Annular solar eclipse over South America. Taken by the EPIC DSCOVR project of NASA.

This week, on Thursday, June 10th, 2021, there will be a solar eclipse. If you are at high latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere including parts of Canada, Greenland and Siberia, you will see a so-called ring of fire as the moon moves in front of the Sun. At lower latitudes the eclipse will be much more partial and in London we are expecting to see 20% of the Sun obscured by the Moon.

You can read more about solar eclipses on other websites such as here or here, on Bean Thinking, we are going to focus on the coffee links to the eclipse.

The first coffee link comes in how to view it. This website suggested a number of ways of viewing the eclipse, one of which was to use a colander. This suggests a perfect adaptation to a view via coffee: the Aeropress filter cap. The idea behind the method is that each of the holes provides a type of pin-hole camera to image the Sun. Knowing roughly where the Sun will be at 10.06am (BST = UTC+1), we can construct a device to hold the aeropress filter cap so that we can see 97 images of the Sun projected onto a piece of paper: 97 images of the Sun to be eclipsed over the following 2hours 18 minutes. The maximum eclipse is around 20% of the solar disc and occurs at approximately 11.15 (although the exact fraction obscured and timing depends on your location). The Aeropress Eclipse viewing device shown in the photo here has an added (smaller) pin hole which should provide a more focussed image of the Sun and so will provide a second way of imaging the eclipse.

A second coffee link comes with thinking about why this particular solar eclipse is not ‘total’ anywhere on earth but is instead described as annular. And to do this, we’ll think about a coffee bean. The amazing visual spectacle of a total solar eclipse occurs because the moon is 400 times smaller than the Sun but is (on average) about 400 times closer to the Earth. So when we think about looking at a coffee bean, held at arms length from our eye (about 60cm), it would totally obscure (eclipse) an object 3.2 m tall, 233.5 m away*.

Eclipse viewer
An aeropress based device for viewing the eclipse. The strings attached to the cardboard flap at the top allow the angle of the aeropress filter cap to be fixed at different points. The camera is at the approximate point where the images will be projected onto paper.

The word “average” though hides an important detail that neither the Moon’s orbit around the Earth, nor the Earth’s orbit around the Sun are completely circular. On the 10th June 2021, the Moon will be two days past its maximum distance (apogee) from the Earth, and while the Sun is also nearly at its maximum distance, the distance ratio will mean that the Moon does not entirely obscure the Sun. Instead, if we return to our coffee bean analogy, it is the equivalent of stretching our arm 2 more centimetres and noticing that the object that was obscured is no longer completely obscured.

This will still make for a fantastic view if you are in Greenland, Siberia or happen to be at the North Pole where you will see a dark disc surrounded by a ring of Sun. For those of us further south, we will only see the Sun partially obscured by the Moon. Nonetheless, such an opportunity in any one particular location doesn’t come super-often (although worldwide there are often several eclipses per year, in London there will only be 42 partial eclipses in this current century). And in London, we have to worry about the weather too. So, if the weather is good for you, why not have a go viewing it, particularly if you adapt a piece of coffee brewing equipment to do so, and post your pictures of the effect here, or to Bean Thinking on Twitter or Facebook.

Finally, the timing of the eclipse is perfect for a mid-morning coffee, though maybe you’ll have to brew with something other than the Aeropress. Have fun.

*These figures have been calculated using a ratio of the size of the Moon to the Sun as 1:400.8 and an average distance of 1:389.2 (calculated from the average values). The distances on June 10 2021 mean that the distance ratio is closer to 1:377

Update to post, the day before (9 June 2021): This is the Aeropress viewing device in action, but 24h before the eclipse. Will the clouds stay away tomorrow?

The Aeropress Eclipse viewer in action. The images of the Sun are projected onto the cardboard behind the filter cap.

Update 10 June 2021: It was cloudy in London and I couldn’t get the Aeropress filter cap method to work in the brief periods of sunshine during the eclipse. Suspect it was a problem with focus-distance/angle/remaining cloud cover at points. However, the smaller pinhole did work (see the blurry image below) and the clouds did mean that there was a natural filter that made a direct photograph possible (see below). Do share your images here if you managed to view it.

Although there were brief periods without cloud, focussing issues etc. meant that I couldn’t get the Aeropress filter cap viewing method to work. Maybe for the next one!
A smaller pinhole did give an image of the Sun being eclipsed (lower blurry bright image)
The fact that it was cloudy did mean however that I could take a photograph of the eclipsed Sun directly. This was at about 11.10am (5 minutes or so before the maximum point of eclipse)