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Missing Out and Trying Something New

Solar Eclipses

I'd like to see a total solar eclipse one day. But for various disability-related reasons (difficulty traveling, COVID, etc.) I didn't manage to see totality for the two most recent eclipses here in the US.

I wrote a long section discussing the details, such as my regret that I didn't see it in 2017, and how it felt last week watching people travel across the country as if COVID no longer exists (while I don't have that luxury). But honestly it was getting me down rehashing it.

I'd rather talk about the experiment I tried during the partial eclipse as a way to keep my mind off my disappointment. The results were a failure, but I had fun, potentially discovered a new hobby or two, and somewhat distracted myself from... well, everything else that my brain had tied to the eclipse.

Cyanotype Prints

My spouse and I used a colander to view pinhole images of the annular eclipse last year, so I was already looking forward to trying that again. Then someone in the Zine Crisis server I frequent mentioned that she was doing a cyanotype workshop during the eclipse, using negative images and objects related to the eclipse to make prints. I started to wonder if I could capture the grid of crescents formed by the colander in a cyanotype print.

Cyanotype printing uses chemicals that react to the sun (UV light, specifically) to create beautiful blue and white prints. It's relatively slow, but that means it's somewhat forgiving. It's also easy to fix/develop — you just use water.

I had no idea if it would work. Would the sun move too quickly and blur the image? Would it be too cloudy? Would I get the cyanotype working at all? (A couple questions that I didn't ask became apparent once the experiment failed, but we'll get to those in a bit.)

I bought some fabric with the chemicals already applied and set about making a box to house the colander and fabric. (Actually my spouse did most of the work, since I was at the tail end of one of the worst and longest crashes I'd had in ages. None of this would have been possible without them!)

We also tested the fabric itself, using lace from my partner's grandmom and glass from some picture frames to hold it in place. It ended up being very dark, which we initially thought was the fabric being old. We tried a second test and washed them in hotter water, which helped a bit.

What we accidentally learned when testing the box and colander setup, however, was that we'd been exposing the fabric for too long. The instructions said 3-15 minutes and that over-exposure was better than under-exposure, so we did the lace tests for 15 minutes to be safe.

However the box didn't last that long; the tape we'd used to hold the metal colander in place got too hot, and the colander fell. We got about 6 minutes of exposure before it failed, and serendipitously that length of time worked well! We ended up with a grid of dark blue dots (lightly smeared) on a white background.

After reconfiguring the box to stand up to gravity without tape, we were ready for the eclipse. Or so we thought...

Failure

Waiting for the eclipse on Monday I was filled with anxiety. Would it be too cloudy? The forecast said "partly cloudy." Wait, now it's sunny. Will it stay sunny? Would the cyanotypes work? Would the crescent shapes be visible? Would they just smear as the sun and moon both moved?

I told myself it was an experiment, and if it didn't work it was still worth trying. That helped, but I still felt silly. I'd started this project to distract myself, but now it was making me anxious.

My parents came over around 2pm as the eclipse started, and I tested the crescents with a spare colander. The idea was to try three exposures for 5 minutes — one at 2:30, one at 3:00 near the maximum coverage, then one at 3:30.

But as I held the spare colander aloft, all I saw were circles, even as we approached 2:30. Where were the crescents?

Which brings me to the first of two major questions I didn't think to ask — what should the focal length be? The focal length depends on the size of the hole, and the holes in our colanders were relatively big. I wasn't holding the spare colander high enough, and that meant the box wouldn't hold the metal colander high enough either.

I don't know why I didn't think to check this beforehand; my only defense is that I honestly don't remember having to hold the colander so high up during the annular eclipse. I remembered crouching and holding the colander near the ground. But alas, my memory must be poor, and I didn't think to look up pinhole camera details before building the box.

We tried it anyway, using some poster board to set the box at an angle and then waiting five minutes. When we washed it out, there were some nice blue dots, but no crescents.

Next we tried to lift the colander higher. We taped it to a table at an angle and put the box underneath. But due to a combination of things (likely length of exposure, extra light coming in from the sides, less sunlight due to clouds and the moon), when we washed this one out it was pure white.

(So the second question I didn't ask was: how much will the sun being covered by the moon increase the necessary exposure time?)

We tried another 2 attempts, including one where we rigged up a second box to cut out more light, threw a blanket over the whole thing, and exposed it for longer. That one had an image before it was washed, but it wasn't exposed enough; the fabric was blank once we finished.

I was disappointed. I'd known it was a strange thing to attempt, and that since I was new to both pinhole cameras and cyanotype printing it was likely to fail. But realizing that it might be possible but I'd just messed up the height and timing was... hard. I kept apologizing to my partner for "making" them help me do something that was such a failure.

It felt even worse when I realized that, had we known the final piece was underexposed, we may have been able to save it. If we'd left it in the sun for a little while (but not too long), it may have resulted in dark blue crescents on a light blue background. Not the stark contrast I'd hoped for, but it would still have been very cool.

Fun?

Of course, I said at the start that I had fun. And weirdly, I did. Despite my anxiety in anticipation, the exhaustion of running around trying to fix things during the eclipse, and the disappointment of not getting the variables right, it was a unique way to experience the partial eclipse. I worked with my partner on an art project, something that for some reason we don't do very often. I hung out with my parents as we watched the moon's path progress across the sun. And I discovered two new art forms that I want to explore: pinhole photography and cyanotype printing.

I'm excited to keep playing with them both. For cyanotypes, I have plans for another experiment — I want to try to capture the water-like patterns formed by sunlight through a glass block window in our house. I also have some ideas for what to do with my recent experiments. The lace tests are very pretty, and I want to embroider some designs on them (likely dragonflies). I may embroider crescent suns on the failed eclipse experiments, too.

For pinhole cameras, this whole process reminded me of solargraphy, which I'd learned about a while ago and then forgotten. People use pinhole cameras, often makeshift ones made with beer cans filled with photographic paper, to take ethereal, long-exposure images that show the arching paths of the sun as it moves across the sky day by day.

I'd been a bit intimidated about making my own beer-can camera, but when I was googling pinhole cameras I came across a reusable "puck" that you can buy for a not unreasonable amount. I think it might be a good place to start!

There are so many interesting and amazing things out there, art forms and natural phenomena alike. It's exciting!