May 20th, Annular eclipse as seen From Crescent City, CA May 20, 2012

 When we read that there would be a great view of the annular eclipse from our home, we were excited.  I had seen an eclipse twice before.  Once in Beijing in 1987, we used a pinhole viewer to project the image, and once here we used a welder's mask during a summer school class I was teaching.  This time there were advertised viewing glasses to be sold at Redwood State Park headquarters.  We went to buy them and they sold out, and we went back several times only to end up standing in a long line at 4:30 on the day of, waiting for a delivery of another 100.  We were allowed to buy one and headed to the beach, but soon realized it was foggier there and the view would be better from our yard.

The first time we noticed a bit of difference in the sun was at 5:15 PM

 We were surprised how thick the lenses were.  We could look through them at a naked electric bulb and not see even a glimmer of light.  But we remembered how quickly a sunbeam focused through a magnifying lens can create a fire and realized we have one of those lenses in our eyes.  I tend to love being able to see, so we used the lens even for the camera.

Taken without using the Viewing lens

This is just to show how light it remained outdoors even at the eclipse 

 It never really got anywhere close to dark, but the light did take on a strange quality, shadows were darker and the bright sides were brighter

 This looks like a U of Oregon Emblem

 The moon slid across the sun and the "ring of Fire" appeared.  We knew this was because the moon was at its furthest from earth and so cast a smaller shadow, unlike what would have happened just a short time ago with the super moon being at its closest point.

this one had a tiny shadow show up from the transit of venus but that was the best I got

And now we got to use our viewer again to see the "Transit of Venus" across the face of the sun on the evening of June 5th.  But the tiny shadow that was visible as a perfect sphere to my eyes was not enough to overcome the brightness in my camera