Rahu Gets Lunch

I got a phone call halfway through the Friday afternoon meeting, and took the opportunity to go look at the eclipse. The clouds had parted and the sun was truely blinding. No sense looking right at it.
So I grabbed two pieces of paper and tried to make a pinhole camera. I got the image focused, but it was WAY to small to see clearly.

So this really nice guy at the site, Bala, who does the Tom Selleck eyebrow thing, comes out and he's concerned that I'm outside in the eclipse. I look around and there's nobody else around.

It seems that since fire purifies (per Indian definition) and the sun is fire: ergo the sun purifies. Consequently when the light of the sun is obstructed, it's purifying power is also eclipsed and bacterias can grow. That's why we weren't suppossed to eat during the eclipse and we were suppose to bathe afterward and why, in general, the eclipse is a bad thing.

Since the pinhole camera wouldn't work, I had Bala hold the paper and used my reading glasses to focus the image of the sun.
All the engineers in the office got very curious and came outside to see what we were doing.
Unfortunately I gave one of them my camera to take a picture of the image, and the poor guy didn't know how to operate it, so the snapshot is poor.
But if you look at the lower right side of the bright dot, you might notice that it looks like someone took a nibble out of it.

No issue: there's not only the lunar eclipse coming, but also a conjunction between the moon and Mars! (see next post)