Eclipse Pinhole Mask



During an eclipse, nice pinhole images can be cast by trees. The last eclipses I saw were in places with no trees, so I carried a colander or a sheet of paper with a pinhole grid cut into it.
For the 2023 annular eclipse I decided to again carry a sheet of pinholes, but with a twist.
I started with a small (123×168px) passport photo, since it already has a light background
  Positive Negative Darker
Use GIMP to make it grayscale, invert, darker by Exposure-3
Convert to halftone image
at picturetopeople.org
In Inkscape, Path->Trace bitmap. Slide away original layer and discard. Save as dxf.
For dark, threshold 0.15
Cut on the laser cutter, hold it in the Sun
Remarks: In the Sun, result is negative, duh. Positive, but holes are too big Too many of the 'pixels' disappeared.

So I took the grid with the too-big holes, and used Inkscape to increase the space between the 'pixels'. I'll go with that.



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Hubert van Hecke