Tuesday was my ninth immunotherapy treatment and the day went pretty much as planned. There was a lot of road construction on the highway this time, but thankfully it didn’t slow traffic enough to be a problem for me. There was no real wait time at the hospital this trip, so that was nice. They even had a treatment room already set up for me as soon as I was done with lab work, so I was able to get in and out of the hospital a little quicker than I have been able to in the past.

Solar Eclipse

I didn’t make a separate post about it, but my family and I were able to see the solar eclipse that occurred recently in our part of the world. It was pretty neat being able to experience totality this time around, and being able to be with my kids and see them experience it too. I had planned to try and use my telescope (with a filter of course) to take some close up pictures, but as it turns out, you need a special and very strong filter for use on a telescope.

A Stern Warning

While preparing to watch the eclipse, I put an extra pair of solar protective glasses over the telescope lens while working slowly (without looking through the telescope) to try and move the telescope around and find the sun. There was NO WAY I was going to be putting any part of my body in front of that telescope lens given what I’ve seen just a simple magnifying glass do when focusing the sun! However, I was hoping to be able to use the solar glasses as a protective layer for a camera lens.

The moment the sun came into the telescope’s view, the solar glasses I was using as a test filter had a hole in them. No smoke, no melting plastic, just an instant hole and a beam of light shooting through them. It was absolutely terrifying how strong that focused light was! The solar glasses were apparently entirely unable to stand up to that amount of energy for even a millisecond. It was basically a “sun laser” shooting through the telescope.

If anyone had been standing in front of that beam, it probably would have hurt them instantly and very badly, even through their clothes. So after the second or two it took me to recover from the shock of the incredible power I had just witnessed, I quickly knocked the telescope out of alignment with the sun to avoid any accidental harm to myself or anyone else around, then put the telescope away just for good measure. 🙂

Just to drive the point home for anyone who might consider a telescope for solar/solar eclipse viewing in the future, you MUST buy a special filter, solar glasses will not work for this!