Does this allow you to see the sun’s corona I wonder?
At totality, to see the corona from the average amateur cereal-box kind of pinhole projector? Maybe not very well
As the brief moments of totality approach, the sun's little crescent of light you see from a pinhole projection gets smaller until it finally fades away like a thread. The remaining light (i.e. just the sun's corona) isn't much stronger than moonlight and might transmit too faintly through the relatively imprecise "pinhole" edges that a straight pin or thumbtack or whatever had made in the cardboard.
In fact if you have commercial eclipse glasses on at totality, you won't see ANYTHING, which is why they say to remove them ONLY when you suddenly see NOTHING, and then be VERY careful to put them back on as the moment passes and the first hint of a crescent forming reappears.
All that stuff is why I rely on professional photographers to take the pictures, and for me the experience is more one of noticing what's happening around me, during even a partial eclipse... the darkening, a breeze springing up as the temperature falls, the birds falling silent after sending alarm calls at the unexpected twilight etc.
But for photography fanatics,,,, there's a lot going on and a lot of ways to photograph some of it.
From 'shadow snakes' and 'double diamonds' to Baily's beads and the corona, here's what you need to prepare for and the gear you need to see it.
www.space.com
The article explains the techniques and safety precautions necessary to photograph a solar eclipse.
en.nikon.ca
If you don't have patience or tools to make a pinhole cam, just take a regular ol' kitchen colander (the kind with holes in it not a mesh strainer) out to the yard and hold it out away from you so the sun can pass through the little holes. You'll see dozens and dozens of tiny eclipsing suns projected onto the ground in front of you....
Don't worry scoring eclipse glasses or crafting a pinhole projector—you already have a projector in your kitchen.
www.epicurious.com
Not to be outdone, The New Yorker offers up a different take, focusing on eclipse viewers through the ages...
Eclipses dazzled the ancient world. Now that we understand them better, they may be even more miraculous.
www.newyorker.com
On May 28, 585 B.C., according to Herodotus, an eclipse led the Medes and Lydians, after more than five years of war, to become “alike anxious” to come to peace. More than a hundred years before that, the Assyrian royalty of Mesopotamia protected themselves from the ill omen of solar eclipses—and from other celestial signs perceived as threatening—by installing substitute kings and queens for the day. Afterward, the substitutes were usually killed, though in one instance, when the real king died, the stand-in, who had been a gardener, held the throne for decades.
Not my image.
