It was fun to make all the pinhole and box viewers and to get all the kids on the block excited. At first I was out on the street with all my gadgets watching as it began. One by one the neighborhood kids strolled by to see what was happening. Within a few minutes, I was conducting an impromptu class on the eclipse. Soon I had them making their own viewers with whatever we could find nearby. It’s these events that create an interest in astronomy and science if we are willing to share them.

Kids need to be excited about learning and sites like yours and your twitter feeds and links make it easy to do that. Kudos.

Also, thanks, Phil, for all these great shots. I wasn’t able to view it personally do to weather problems. I still watched it on the Slooh.com website, where they had live feeds from both California and New Mexico. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Now I am anticipating the Transit of Venus even more.

1) The smaller the hole, the sharper the image, since (ideally) you want every point in the object (the Sun) to map to exactly one point on the image plane.

2) The larger the hole, the sharper the image, since light (as a wave) diffracts as it passes through an aperture.

The “sweet spot” compromise (optimizing for the middle of the visible spectrum, 550 nm) between these conflicting factors gives the following formula:

d = 1.158 * sqrt(D)

or, if you prefer to design the projector around the size of the pinhole:

D = 0.7452 * d^2

Where
d = diameter of the pinhole in mm
D = distance between the pinhole and the projected image in meters.

So, for a 2 m projection distance, your pinhole should be 1.6 mm. Note that the image will be pretty faint, so you may want to project inside a darkened space, like a cardboard mailing tube. I made one with a 1.6mm (1/16 inch) hole projecting 1.88 m (74 inches), and it looked pretty good on Sunday. Now I’m dying to see if it has the resolution and contrast to show Venus in transit.

*I have, however, had the pleasure of meeting your country’s all-time greatest export… a certain Mr. K. B. Wilson.

Looking good so far. Watching on NASA-TV as I type. (Online coverage link in my name here.)

NASAKennedy The SpaceX launch team gave its final “go” to launch. 1 min ago.

Source : Twitter feed sidebar on the site linked to my name.

EDIT : now T-minus 1 minutes 32 seconds. (5 minutes 01 secs to go editing time~wise for that.)

Can’t wait til the November 14th solar eclipse which I’m planning to observe from Cairns Northern Australia.