I saw my first solar eclipse yesterday!  It was both painful (because I don't know how to view a solar eclipse the correct way) and also totally worth the eye damage because it was incredible!  Okinawa's peak time to view the solar eclipse was at 10:45 am.  I was in a meeting then, but at around 10:20am we all went out to join the rest of the neighbourhood on roofs and streets to wait.  At 10:20am the sun was still to bright to look at for more than a couple of seconds, but all around the sun was this huge bright ring.  What made the ring amazing was that the edges of the ring were a faded rainbow.  

I know it's hard to see but the ring is actually a thin, round rainbow.  It was incredible.  (This, by the way, is the only picture of the eclipse I'm posting because my camera sucks.)  Around 10:30am it started to get dark.  We didn't experience a total eclipse, so it didn't become night, but everything went dim and became shadow.  The temperature, I later heard, dropped from 33C to 29C, and all the birds and cicadas went quiet.  It was eerie, the cold wind, and silence.

The sun became easier to look at, and we watched the eclipse through sunglasses.  It really looked like the moon was eating the sun.  The Japanese character for eclipse, 日食 is just that, the day being eaten. 

And for hours afterwards, everywhere I looked there were bright white dots.     

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