I had a good time attending the recent solar full eclipse. Our home wasn’t in the zone of totality, was 85% there. We wanted to see totality, so we took a 3 day road trip. I joked that we spent 3 days in the car to get 3 minutes of thrill. Kinda like the lines at Disney world. Here is the journal entry from that day, pictures are below:
Today was a solar total eclipse. My daughter and I drove to Louisville KY for a home base, then we traveled to the small town of Washington on the southern tip of Indiana to watch it. The weather was perfect, a clear sky and comfortable temperatures.
As the totality approached us, the sky in one direction was dark, kinda looked like a big storm was coming but you couldn’t see any details in the clouds. And where we were, it looked like someone had turned down the colors, everything felt more grey and less bright. Kinda like wearing polarized sunglasses. I did have to get an extra shirt to put on because the temperature was getting colder. Right before totality it was interesting that so little sunshine still made a crisp shadow on the ground.
When totality hit there were cheers from the people at the park that we were at. It went from light to dark in a fraction of a second. And it was surprising that the sun went from unwatchable bright to being able to stare at the corona and take photos with no protection. There was a tiny orange dot at the bottom, and while talking to some folks who had a better camera, they were able to zoom in and it was clearly a flare that was outsizing the moon’s perimeter. (I learned later that it actually wasn’t a flare, but a prominence because it loops back instead of ejecting a matter into space.)
My daughter had Lyric’s SLR, and used some leftover solar glasses to Macgyver a filter for the SLR and get some decent pictures. Also during the totality there was a 360 degree orange sunset. The ambient light felt like it was 20-30 minutes before going full dark nighttime, it wasn’t full nightime. I could see stars/planets/satellites in the sky quite well. I tried to capture the weird ambient light, but my camera phone kept auto-correctly it to look normal. The SLR camera captured the corona, but the corona was also plainly visible to the unaided eye, that was really cool and my favorite part. It probably would have been darker where we were located had we not sat under a street lamp that turned on. Totality lasted about 3.5 minutes.
It was surprising again when the smallest sliver became visible that the sun was too bright to look at. As we snacked, packed and waited around for about 30 minutes, most of the people left, and the brightness and warmth was slowly returning. The crowds in the towns and roads weren’t an issue. An hour after we left, the sky clouded over, so I felt that we were very lucky with the clouds. The traffic we did hit on the interstate was due to construction and slow-moving vehicles.
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