Things were looking up.

Last week was a good one for staring up at the sky. Well, sort of. Technically, I think I heard somewhere once that you're not supposed to "stare" at an eclipse. Old wives' tale, right? Right?

To recap, last Saturday morning, we looked off the balcony and saw a white, shiny ball hovering quietly somewhere over Shibuya. It was probably a blimp, viewed head-on.

Sunday, killing time waiting for Terminator Salvation to start, an amazing pale half rainbow arched over Tokyo Tower and then brightened and then doubled. My rainbow picture was just from my cell phone - Jim happened to have his camera out to take this because the light was nice right before the rainbow came out.















And of course, on Wednesday, the longest total solar eclipse for another hundred years or so passed over Tokyo just before lunch. Most of the coverage griped about the lousy weather and heavy cloud cover. It was cloudy. But I didn't have much work to do and wandered over to the nearby Sumida River to check it out anyway. There was a whole lot of cloudy sky and nothing else for a while. The cover was so thick I couldn't even tell where in the sky the sun would be. And then, suddenly, almost straight over head behind a thin patch in the clouds, there it was - a little crescent moon. And then gone again. But then back! A woman with a yappy dog sat on a bench and took photos with a cell phone. I thought that was a dumb idea but tried it anyway and it came out better than you would think. An old man and I pointed at the sky grinned at each other. I hung out for a while, watching the eclipse flash in and out of the clouds, a little different each time. A bunch of office workers stood on a corner nearby and squealed. As I walked back to the office, there were still little clots of people scattered around. A woman watched me as I walked by, looking a little concerned. I asked, "You see it?" She looked relieved and said "Yeah!" I imagined she was afraid I didn't know there was an eclipse on. That's how I felt when I saw joggers going along the river without looking up at all.













I think this photo came out pretty well for a point and shoot with no tripod. Incidentally, something bad happened to my Ixy's display screen on the trip home - when I got off the airplane, a plastic hairclip in my bag was snapped in two and there was a pinkie-print size dead spot on the camera screen. It puts a grey glob with a corona around it on every image. Looking at the eclipse pictures on that screen, it looks like a partial eclipse next to a (dull) total eclipse.