Back in 2017 we travelled with my partner to the United States for our first total solar eclipse, and it was a great success. I got some nice photos out of it, and the experience was amazing. You can read my blog post about it, although it is only available in Finnish. The 2017 eclipse left me wanting more, and I started looking at next opportunities to see a total eclipse.

As you might have noticed, The Other Computer has changed quite a bit! Most of the code underlying the website was rewritten. Previously the website was implemented with JavaScript and Gatsby, but the Gatsby framework kept changing at a fast pace, deprecating many of the things my website relied on. I got tired of updating things, and fell back to the old reliable, Hugo. Initially I converted all my old styling information to the new website, but got kind of tired of how the site looked, and I switched to the Hello Friend theme by panr.

For the past months I have been obsessing over solar astronomy, and specifically a device called Sol’Ex or Solar Explorer. It is a spectroheliograph, which allows capturing the spectrum of a very thin slice of the sun’s disk. By capturing many images while scanning over the sun’s disk with the device, you can reconstruct an image of the whole sun at any visible wavelength you want. There is a catch, though.