A day when people looked up at the sky and may have seen the green and black sun

[squirmelia]

I gazed up at the sky through binoculars, while wearing a welding mask, standing outside my office. Someone else appeared to be looking at the sky through a CD. The sun, oh, a beautiful glowing green orb punctuated by the black image of Venus. I'm tempted to buy a welding mask so the sun will always look like that.

Comments

[absinthecity.livejournal.com]

I saw the students outside St Martins doing this yesterday. It's only now I've read your post that it's dawned on me what they were up to, though!

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

I always get strange looks when I run out of the building to see the snow when it is snowing, but looking at the sun with a welding mask on seems perfectly normal.

[electrodeserter.livejournal.com]

When I was seven or eight, I had a pair of huge cheap supermarket kids' sunglasses, lime green plastic with great big lenses which were mirrored on the outside. They made it almost too dark to see anything at all, but I spent most of the time staring directly at the green and black sun, which looked scarcely any brighter than a full moon, lying on my back watching the clouds turn the colour and brightness up and down as they passed in front of it.

I've often wondered if this damaged my eyesight in some serious way.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Sounds cool. :)

Does the sun look a bit green around the edges to you sometimes still, even when you're not wearing those glasses? That would be an interesting side-effect of having looked at it for too long.
Maybe you should purchase some red-lensed glasses, so that you can try to counteract the effect? Although then, the sun might start looking red, so you'd have to wear the green ones again, and would probably end up with some strangely patterned green and red sun, so maybe best just to leave it green.

[leoz.livejournal.com]

AAAgh! My eyes!

When I was little I used to stare at the sun for minutes on an end without blinking. It was weird cause you see this disk of fire but in its center you see this weird shadow. It's not really a shadow but the sun's brightness overcoming your eyes. Uhm...yesh.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Can you still blink?

[gentio.livejournal.com]

And if you need a reminder of it....

http://www.astro.ex.ac.uk/venus/images/


here's some pictures of the venus transit

:)

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

But the sun isn't green in those pictures! They're just not realistic enough. ;)

[fluffymark]

green and black sun

I always knew the sun was made of chocolate.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Have you ever eaten the sun?

[solitarywalker.livejournal.com]

There was a solar eclipse once, i was in college at the time i think, and i went out to watch it but i was not equipped with proper sun-seeing gear, and i sat on a bench in the park feeling kind of stupid with people around me looking up at the sky eyes properly protected. And looking at the ground i saw the missing part of the sun reflected in the shadows of the leaves of the tree above me, so i watched the sun by looking down at the shadows nature had conveniently provided me.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

The shadows sound like they were just as beautiful as the event itself.
In the UK, there was a solar eclipse in 1999, but unfortunately it was cloudy, so I didn't get to see the appropriate patterns. I laid in a cornfield and watched the sky get dark and even that seemed amazing. What I wrote about that eclipse can be read here (http://www.livejournal.com/users/squirmelia/996.html).

[(Anonymous)]

who was it you were with when you saw the eclipse?

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

When Venus eclipsed the sun? Random people from the office appeared outside the building and looked up at the sun too, although I don't remember who exactly they were.

[(Anonymous)]

no the solar one in 1999

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Hint: Not the moon.