DIY solar eclipse projection

We had a very nice partial solar eclipse in the UK on the 12th towards the late hours, which gave Spain a spectacular total eclipse at sunset. Was preparing to watch it, which kind of went into the mission failed successfully territory.

No eclipse glasses, planned out how I would project it on my wall the day before. The flat I am renting just happened to be oriented especially well for this. Well, planned. Pretty much spent an afternoon gathering whatever random stuff I could find to contrive something I thought would work.

Then it failed miserably when the eclipse started, and thus born the iteration botched together in about five minuter after it began and actually worked. The mirror miraculously survived teetering on the brink of faceplanting from the tower of random boxes and other stuff I kept shuffling around every ten minutes to follow the sun! (In retrospect, could have ripped off the bathroom cabinet's large mirror, deposit be damned, we don't have over 90% eclipses every... decade!)

The centre hole of a DVD is not really anyhow ideal for this, but that was the only thing I found of a reasonably adequate size for the job. As later I looked up, the focal distance for that used as a pinhole would be still way too large, but going across twice the room thank to the mirror was about good enough to get a nice view.

I even had a setup for the camera to keep running capturing video, but it decided the whole wall wasn't enough for it to figure out where to focus, and got only some five minutes out of it where it somehow happened to guess that yes, I was intending to record the wall. So I got an hour of footage of some bright blurry blob slowly creeping across the wall, occasionally jumping around as every ten or so minutes I adjusted the mirror. So there went the idea of having a somewhat interesting timelapse of the thing.

But got to see the eclipse after all, so still a success!