My family gathered at my mom's house in Buhl yesterday for a solar eclipse barbeque and I managed to snap some cool, but completely accidental photos of the eclipse.

We were set up with our eclipse pinhole viewer, and it was projecting a fantastic image, but my sister and I wondered what would happen if we tried to click a few pictures with our smartphones? The results were... interesting.

I have an iPhone 4 and she has an HTC Android. Mine has a 5mp camera and hers is 8mp. We managed to make similar photos, but what happened in these pictures?

Reflected Eclipse: The photos were caused by a reflection in the multiple lenses of the smartphones (the iPhone and the HTC both have four lenses). The lens reflects a small portion of light back at the source, so if a sufficiently bright light source is observed--like a solar eclipse--some of the light is reflected from the second lens onto the back of the objective lens and becomes reflected back into the camera as an identical image without the glare.

So these images were completely accidental, but utterly cool! Now hopefully I didn't burn my camera sensor out by pointing it at the sun.

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