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Today, of course, it is sunny. So I decided to set up the full-sized pinhole camera to see what could have been during yesterday’s eclipse. In full sun it was much easier to aim the camera than it was when cloudy. I just had to move the camera around until the tube was casting no shadow. The image of the sun did travel across the paper fairly quickly, but I think I could have kept up with it. More on that below. In the video below, you can see the bigger image of the sun, with fair detail when clouds pass over about 1/3 through the video.
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My original sketch for the project aimed to produce an image with a 2 cm radius. That would have required a length of 4.3 m between pinhole and screen. The full-length camera is closer to 3.5 m.
So how big was the image and how fast did it move? I put a piece of graph paper in and took two stills to find out. Below is a composite of those stills. The image of the sun appears to have a radius of 1.6 cm (the paper is Imperial) and the image moved about 1.5 cm per minute. I would have had to re-aim the camera about every 10 minutes. I would call this project a success, even if the weather didn’t cooperate!
