Eclipse (this is not about the Twilight series. Sorry, Ty.)

I lucked out ("You LUCK!") this past week and got a couple pairs of free eclipse-viewing glasses at school from one of the science teachers. This is one of the advantages of working at a school. I will get back to you with the other advantages at another time. We happened to be having family dinner at the wife's parents' place on Sunday, which gave us a relatively unobscured  (which the editor is telling me is not a word) view of the valley. Having never shot a solar eclipse before, I learned a few things:

1. This would probably work better with some sort of filter.
2. It is difficult to see through a camera's viewfinder with eclipse-viewing glasses.
3. Because it is difficult to see, it is difficult to know where, exactly, the solar eclipse is in the frame.
4. Shooting directly into the sun is a good way to find out where you have dust on your camera's sensor.
5. It would be pretty cool to have a fancy telescope and the ability to attach a camera.
6. Sharing eclipse-viewing glasses with a wide range of in-laws, nieces and nephews and my own children at dinner time means that someone, sometime, is going to get jelly on said glasses.
7. The wife's brother knows how to make a camera obscura.

Here are the pictures:

We did not get the full ring of fire (sorry, Johnny Cash), but it just scraped across the top of the sun (scraped, as in "moved in front of, roughly 100 million miles away").  It was still really cool. The last shot is the eclipse-shaped shadows cast by the tree in my mother-in-law's front yard. I liked the flares that my lens captured--what I was seeing through the glasses was always different than how it came out in the photos--I don't know if that was because I needed a filter or what. Probably.