Maybe my phone case making a pinhole for light somehow?
Your camera lens is made of several pieces of glass. The glass is designed to admit as much light as possible on to the sensor, but at each layer, a small amount is reflected.
If the source light is bright enough, especially in comparison to the background, these reflections bounce around a bunch and eventually hit the sensor. Normally, any reflections are very faint and get washed out by the rest of the image, but the sun is like 1000x brighter than the sky, so even a weak reflection shows up.
Also known as a "lens flare".
ahhh, this is what the cause of lens flare is?
I saw that on the ground during a solar eclipse under a tree
Any colander/pasta strainer with round holes works wonders for this. One hundred little eclipses cast on the ground--it's like a free pinhole camera!
My husband was telling me that sometimes it lines up just right through trees and you'll get thousands of little eclipses lol. Must be nice to have lots of trees. Stupid desert :(
Very true! I viewed a solar eclipse under an arbor/pergola that was covered with leaves, and the entire length of the sidewalk inside was nothing but tiny crescent suns.
Here's another neat one: 
Ooh, that's a classic! An inevitable happy accident on your behalf.
Shadows under tree canopies also create the same effect, a lot of little "pinhole cameras" between leaves.
I love the tree shadow ones. So trippy.
I drilled a hole in a piece of scrap wood I had in my shop so my wife and I could observe it the only way we could with what we had on hand. Still cool as hell to see that in any form IRL.
Lens flare
What's with all the eclipse posts on the socials today? Did I miss something?
The eclipse
What eclipse?
The one with the sun and the moon.
Nobody told me there was going to be an eclipse today (until after it was over). The media is usually pretty good at doing that, but not this time. It went right over my state too, and I didn't notice shit.
Don’t miss the one next year in April
It's my understanding that there will be a total eclipse on April 8!
The moon is further away this time, so the moon doesn't totally cover the sun.
I mostly heard about it from TikTok tbh. Been hearing about it all month but I also follow a lot of space channels on there so that'd be why lol
Cool!
Rules:
1.. Please mark original photos with [OC] in the title if you're the photographer
2..Pictures containing a politician from any country or planet are prohibited, this is a community voted on rule.
3.. Image must be a photograph, no AI or digital art.
4.. No NSFW/Cosplay/Spam/Trolling images.
5.. Be civil. No racism or bigotry.
Photo of the Week Rule(s):
1.. On Fridays, the most upvoted original, marked [OC], photo posted between Friday and Thursday will be the next week's banner and featured photo.
2.. The weekly photos will be saved for an end of the year run off.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://mastodon.world/about
