Eclipse dappled shadow
Anyone figured out why this happens?
My understanding:
This phenomenon happens all the time with any shadow made by sunlight passing through something with lots of holes like tree foliage. The difference is that the normal earth human's mind grows up interpreting "overlapping images of the circular white disk of the sun" as the non-verbal "that's just how shadows of sunlight look in the shade of a tree". After some vocabulary is learned, they might call the pattern "dappled sunlight".
During a solar eclipse, the pattern temporarily changes to "overlapping images of the crescent of the sun peeking around the moon", but it's still overlapping images of the sun. You can make a particularly sharp image of the white circle of the sun with a pinhole projector.