We did a couple of stories in The National about the solar eclipse today, described as “the longest of the millennium” … so we had to go out and look, didn’t we?

At 11 a.m., we dutifully traipsed outside the Teeny Tiny Apartment and into the narrow street. The sun was coming down brightly on the far side, so we went over there … and tried to figure out how to have a look at this thing.

And, eventually, we saw it … and even got a picture of it, but the picture is so big that (to spare those not interested) I’m going to put it on the other side of this break.

Remember, it was a partial eclipse of the sun, where we were. Even at the height of the eclipse, as the moon cut off its biggest bit of the sun … only about 33 percent of it would be obscured, here in Abu Dhabi. (The really big show was south of us, in central Africa, and in the Indian Ocean, where it was a near-total eclipse.)

I was thinking of sneaking a peek with the naked eye which, yes, I know, is supposed to leave you blind as a bat in a matter of seconds. I gave up that reckless idea because the sun here is particularly intense. Just looking up in the sky seemed to hurt my eyes. So, no, no direct gazing at the sun.

We read about a new method of eclipse-watching, this year: Get a bucket of water, and put it on the ground, and look at the sun’s reflection in the water.

Sadly, we don’t have a bucket, or even a big bowl, so Leah brought out a cereal dish … which wasn’t nearly wide enough. The only image we saw in the bowl was the shadow the rim of the bowl was casting on the water.

Hmm. So, back inside to look for viewing methods on the internet. We came across the old standby: Poke a round hole in a piece of cardboard and hold that piece away from another piece … and watch it like that, through a primitive projector.

We tried a hole in a bit of styrofoam, only a white bit of cardboard … and it didn’t quite work either.

So, one more try: Tin foil, pricked with a tiny round hole (a toothpick worked well for that) … and hold the foil up between the sun and a piece of cardboard. The farther from the cardboard the foil is, the bigger the image. But also fainter. The closer you get, the more focused the image gets, but it also shrinks in size.

That actually worked. Seems the key was to get a fairly round but small hole.

So, we have a picture of it, below.

I know it will be hard to see, so I’ll describe it for you. This is a rectangular piece of white cardboard placed atop the red bricks of a sidewalk across the street. Covering most of the cardboard is a blue-ish shadow cast by the tin foil (and the shadow to the right is my hand/arm holding the foil). Anyway, about in the middle of the blue-ish shadow is a small, almost-round patch of light gray.

That is the sun. And the curving slice of the sun missing at the top … is the eclipse. Where the moon got between the sun and Abu Dhabi.

No, not spectacular. It was a primitive system we had going on, and the eclipse was just past its height, too, by about 10 minutes.

But, still … solar eclipses are not common. Though I do have a sense that I have been in one when it actually got dark, around us. I can’t tell you when this one, but maybe 30 years ago … and somewhere in southern California?

I can see who solar eclipses of any significance freaked out the ancients. They’re going along, and then it gets dark in the middle of the day, and they look up (and if they didn’t go blind) and see what appears to be something eating the sun!

This had none of that sinister feel to it. In fact, the slice of sun missing was, even at its peak, not enough to darken the day to a degree we could notice.

A non-event? Not quite. We got a hazy picture out of it. And we saw the longest solar eclipse of the millennium. Not the best, not where we were. But the longest. Always good to be involved with an extreme natural phenomenon, right?

Oh, and if you want to see a nice graphic element on the eclipse that appeared in The National, click at the bottom of the linked story (at the top of this post), and download the image. The map gives you a good idea of the path of the eclipse, and how big it was in all the areas where it could be seen. I recommend it.