Abstract Thursday: "Time"

Ingeborg would like us to represent “Time” for Abstract Thursday. “Not an easy challenge,” I thought.
 
This photo isn’t really an abstract although it may look like one, but it does represent the passage of time (5 minutes of time in fact).
 
I’m a really lucky lad: next Thursday I set off on a photographic holiday in the western USA. The holiday’s led by blipper and pro John Gravett; I know of at least 2 other blippers going (Technophobe & Loosecanon).
 
One of the highlights (as long as weather permits) will be to witness (and hopefully photograph) the total solar eclipse on 21 August. So I’ve recently bought a 20-stop Eclipse Filter and wanted to try it out. Lo & behold, the sun shone today so I had a play.
 
What you see here is 2 uncropped photos of the sun taken about 5.30pm today, 5 minutes apart, and layered together into one in Photoshop (using the “lighten” merge function). I didn’t move the camera (fixed on a tripod) between shots or juggle the position of the photos in Photoshop (honest!). So what we see here is the sun marking time, moving from the left side of the camera frame to the right (and also getting a little lower in the sky) over the 5 minute period.
 
When I took my first experimental shots, I thought I had a piece of dust on the sensor, showing towards the edge of the sun at about the “4.30 o’clock” position. But you’ll see that the exact same spot appears in two completely different parts of the sensor. Having now looked at photos of the sun on the web, I realise that it’s actually a sunspot.
 
What fun!
 
NB I’m sure you’re all very sensible, but as they used to say on BBC's "Blue Peter" programme, “please don’t try this at home” without the necessary equipment to protect your camera and (even more important) your eyes. Don’t point the camera at the sun without an effective “eclipse” filter in place (Loosecanon’s shown us how to make a home-made one here!), and don’t ever look directly at the sun even through the camera viewfinder or through sunglasses.