A'ight everyone, welcome back to Cody'sLab
So today I'm just going to do a quick arts and crafty type video
And show you guys how to build a pinhole sun viewer
It's the same thing that I built back in 2003 to view the Venus transit
'Course I was about 11 or 12 back then so I guess this is a project that a little kid could do
So I got a bunch of stuff here
Let's put it together
So what I've got here is a couple of empty Pringles cans
Some Dixie cups, I'll probably only need one
Tin foil and parchment paper which I may or not use
Duct tape, scissors
Magnifying lens
And a pushpin
Okay, so first thing we need is a pinhole. Let's take the metal part of the can stick the pin through it here
Try to get towards the center
So now if I line this up with the sun, you can see down here on the pavement you see a little spot of light
Farther away, the bigger that spot gets and that spot is of course
an image of the sun. See if I move my hand in front of the sun, you can see
You know it
I'm eclipsing it there you actually can see
the sun being eclipsed that's of course what the moon will be doing here in about a month, so
That's the easy part
Effectively, I now have a camera, but let's make it something that we can actually use as a viewer
We're going to be hooking two of these cans together
Using a magnifying lens to increase the size of the image.
I'm just cutting off the bottom of one of the cans
The whole idea here is to give this a longer tube
Give the light more time to spread out
Let's tape these together
The sidewalk is not exactly level is it?
Okay, so now that I got the tubes put together into one long tube.
I just need this side cut here cut the bottom off of it
Doesn't have to look too pretty
Goodbye tube!
Now we've got this long tube
With a pinhole at the end. I'm going to cut this Pringles thing right about
at the focal length of the magnifying lens and just measure that real quick looks like
Just a bit short
(INAUDIBLE)
So, those like to fit about there
Right about there. It should not be perfect, but
It's gotta be close
Sort of trim up the edges so they're smooth
Now this piece that's right here, which is
got this smoothed over lip. Now, we're going to stretch our screen over it. I'm going to actually use this plastic bag because
It's recycling, right
Stretch it tight
I'm taking some of that tape. Have me that tape
Now I'm just going to tape this on and cut off the excess of the bag there. There we go, our screen.
So what this is is going to let most the light through but it'll stop some
So you can actually see the image of the sun on the plastic just like this
Finish trimming this up
So now I'm going to take this
and tape it right there
just like that
Turns out they don't make cups quite as tough as they used to make 'em so I'm having to put two of these cups together
I'm just going to cut off the bottom of the cup so that you can see through it
to a point where it's the same size as the Pringles can
This of course is the adapter that I'm going to be using to tape the
magnifying lens to
Now for the magnifying lens, which I'll just tape on
Just like that. There's the magnifying lens stuck on there. Let's see if this thing works.
It sure does yeah, see. There you can see the image of the sun
I've taped it up completely so that it looks a little bit better
And now what all we need is something to see anything that gets in front of the sun should show up on this, it'll be
reversed because of the ways of the light work
so it goes through you know apart from the sun this side will wind up on the
Opposite side and like that, but it also expands the image so you can see it better. We got a little bit of cloud cover there
You can see there's a light pole. Let's move the sun, so the light pole is partially covering it
Right there
Now let's use our little
viewfinder to see how it looks. Alright there you can see it my camera is having trouble focusing
but you can kind of see the shadow of the streetlamp on the clouds there even
Walk forward a little bit so I can partially cover the sun
There you go
You can actually really see it really well
There's something that I think is a little bit more interesting in the street light though see these
power lines, we have a shadow on the ground you can see but it's not a full shadow. This is a
very much a penumbral shadow here, because it doesn't completely block out the sun for this distance that we have
Alright so there's the image of the sun, now a lot forward
Have one of those wires cross in front of it
There we go
It's really hard to get the camera to focus on that you can see the line going through the sun there
As you may have guessed this is not only useful for viewing solar eclipses and transits
But you can also take some interesting pictures like if you can somehow set this up, so that an airplane flies across the sun
You can see that
I've used it to take a picture of a windmill with the sun as the backdrop, all sorts of things
So there you go a little simple device that allows you to look at the sun
See it takes this pinhole, and it expands it to a larger size, so the intensity is not quite as much
So it doesn't hurt your eyes anymore
Still, use caution
The magnifying lens is not extremely necessary
But it's nice because it makes the image a little bit larger. One of the problems with the eclipse classes is the sun's still only
About the size of a key held at arm's length, but this makes the image
inside a little bit larger without the size of a
You know a dollar coin held at arms length, but not, not huge, but certainly a lot larger
Anyway,
Hope y'all enjoyed see you next time