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Goofball Answer:

trobe,

The answer to your question, I'm afraid, is buried far deeper than anything your Mama or Manfred Mann's Mama may have said. You see, most Moms and Dads will tell their kids not to look at the sun, for the simple fact that all those photons incident upon tender retinas will lead to damage. And this is probably as deep as your Mama was trying to get. But when we begin to look at the sage advice Manfred Mann was giving us, the plot thickens.

First, Manfred Mann didn't write that shit; Bruce Springsteen did. And if you've ever listened to the lyrics of "Blinded by the Light" carefully, you'll notice it's deeply metaphorical and wickedly confusing. It's damn-near as difficult to decipher as James Joyce's book Finnegan's Wake (emphasis on "damn-near").

Here's a sample of what I'm talking about:
"Some silicone sister with a manager mister
Told me I got what it takes
She said I'll turn you on sonny to something strong
Play the song with the funky break
And go-cart Mozart was checkin' out the weather chart
To see if it was safe outside
And little Early-Pearly came by in his curly wurly
And asked me if I needed a ride.
Asked me if I needed a ride."

Now I don't know what half that shit means, but I can comfortably say there's nothing in there about the sun, fission, fusion, or photons. So I don't think Bruce was preparing us for a literal discussion about the sun's energy. I think he was talking about something more powerful: a woman.

And here's where I draw my conclusion from—just before Bruce hits us with his advice about looking into the eye of the sun, he says the following:
"She got down but she never got tired
She's gonna make it through the night
She's gonna make it through the night"

And then, if you recall, the entire tempo and feeling of the song changes. The song slows down dramatically, and there's an interlude representing "the night", which could be literal, or could simply represent some dark period in this woman's life. But then, dawn breaks, and we arrive at the climax of the situation, cued with another dramatic change in the music. And Bruce says,
"Mama always told me not to look into the eyes of the sun...
But mama, that's where the fun is."

And we all know the sun doesn't have eyes. But women do. And with them, they can level the best of us—even The Boss.

But none of this gets to why that stupid black spot showed up in my little video. And I hate the Soundgarden song Black Hole Sun, so I won't even try to get cute with that piece of crap. I'll just tell you how it is. And it is like this:

My camera is only capable of properly exposing light and dark tones over a certain range. It can't possibly balance the entire range of values from black to white in one frame without losing some detail on one end of the spectrum or the other. This is to say, if the camera tries to make the white things look white, the objects in the frame that are dark, but not quite black, are going to be represented as black. On the other hand, if the camera tries to faithfully represent black objects in the frame, those things that are near white are going to appear as white. So some detail is lost no matter what the camera tries to do.

In the video you mentioned, there are many tones represented in the frame, across the entire spectrum. The harness of my parachute is black, and the light of the sun is WHITE, in the strongest sense possible. And it is intense. So the camera has a decision to make: does it favor the white end of the spectrum, or does it favor the black end? In this case, the sun takes up only a small amount of the frame, and the camera realizes this, so it is given less importance. Therefore, the camera makes an attempt to represent the sun faithfully, but the center of the sun goes so far beyond the camera's ability to do so, that the camera fails, and we get black.

You'll notice the color balance in the frame at the end of the video isn't so great. I appear dark and muted. This is because of the large amount of bright space behind me—both the sun and the sky. Because there is so much bright space, the camera gives this greater weighting, and I get muted.

And trobe, that's why the sun in my video has a black spot, even if it isn't really the "eyes of the sun".

Now ladies, just because you know your eyes are where the fun is, don't go using that against us. OK? Thank you.

~ topher