Watching the Sun go out

Last night's solar eclipse was a marvellous experience which tugged at the root of what it means to be human and part of a community. We had to be in London and so made for Regent's Park where we swapped our home-made pinhole camera with children's converted cereal boxes, special specs bought by the prudent before supplies ran out and even the occasional colander for tiny, multiple images.

Here is a sequence of our own little sun, carried through the most home-made of cameras constructed by Penny, a sheet of cardboard with a very small hole pierced by a screwdriver. The final picture in my first quartet was taken through the viewing-specs lens of the kind woman with the black umbrella.  What a terrific experience!

P's invention also multi-tasked as a fan on the very hot train to London and a picnic tray on the journey home - shown above with my colander hat which in the event we left at home because it was too big to take with us.

I didn't put out the trap last night what with all the astronomical excitement but the moths have been coming steadily if unspectacularly for the last few very warm nights. On one of them, I placed the trap on a table beneath our Temporary Heatwave Gazebo which produced a rather ethereal effect: 

Here are some of the arrivals, from top left down: European Cornborer micro, Marbled Beauty, Common Purple and Gold, Elephant Hawk (the first for a few weeks after a flood in June and July), Sallow Kitten, Chinese Character, Waved Umber, Six-stripe Rustic and Light Emerald from below: 

Then Tawny Speckled Pug, Single-dotted Wave (with its many dots), Lesser Broad-bordered Yellow Underwing, Orange Swift, Cypress Pug (on the gazebo roof; did you know that 'gazebo' is an invented word contriving a future tense in Latin style for 'gaze'), Snout, Broad-barred White, Frosted Orange and another European Cornborer.

Finally, I have given this specially lovely micro a full picture of its own; behold the aptly-named Beautiful China-mark with a more modest companion whose ID is still be sorted out by poor old me. And a lovely fresh Anania coronata micro, known in the US as the Elderberry Pearl and here more aptly as the Spotted Magpie, contrasted with a more battered one which visited in June: