As the crow flies at sunrise

The morning of December 21, 2010, Fynn and I drove up to the Rotenberg to observe and photograph the solar eclipse at 9:15. Temperatures were below freezing, making it difficult to enjoy being up there. Besides the vague idea I had about taking pictures of the sun without looking into the viewfinder of the camera, we were not prepared to watch the spectacle. We brought some cereal boxes to make pinhole viewers, but it had been 40 years since I last used one so they were useless in the end.
However, a nice woman came up to us and let us use her protective glasses to see the sun. It was indeed an interesting sight. We came off the mountain ready for a warm breakfast and I thought I hadn't really gotten any good shots of the eclipse. I followed a crow through the vineyards in the valley near Uhlbach and think the austerity of those pictures sums up how the cold felt. Interestingly, the light in these pictures of the crow does not look anything like that in the sunrise pictures.

When I looked at the pictures of the sun (1/4000 sec; f32; 300mm) on the computer and turned up the clarity on them, we could actually see the bite that the moon took out of the sun that morning. All in all, it wasn't as spectacular or thrilling as we had expected, but it was a nice father/son/sun thing to do!