My super high-tech eclipse viewer, sponsored by Kenneth Cole Reaction:
The result (looked better in person)
I was later able to borrow a pair of eclipse glasses from a coworker (they’d all been sold out by the time I started looking for some). The cardboard box is certainly better than nothing, but with the glasses it’s much more impressive.
That would scare the crap out of me.
We had 99.6 percent coverage in town. The temperature dropped, and in the few minutes around our maximum coverage time, the change in lighting was particularly cool. We saw one star come out. Really cool! Hoping we can make the next one work out to see it in totality.
Holy shit, clouds got pretty light, can see with the clouds even.
Very cool and fun for the family, eclipse glasses worked great. Didn’t get totality here but close, and fun to watch on CNN. Also had a pinhole cereal box going too for everyone to try but the glasses were a hit.
International Space Station or… tie fighter?
Sometimes it makes me ashamed how places like NASA and JPL throw miracles at us a mile a minute and we mostly just act blase about it, if we even notice. (We as in ‘most people,’ not Qt3ers…)
Starting to feel a little Dooms Day-ie in SC.
And we reached totality!!! So cool - so dark. When should I expect my superpowers?
Saw 2 and a half minutes totality in the country graveyard! I’m glad 1,300 miles driving in 2 days paid off.
To put that in perspective for Europeans, that’s like driving from Paris to Berlin and back again to Paris.
It always pisses me off when folks say stuff like, “Why are we spending money on space travel, when everyone on earth doesn’t have food?”
You’re never gonna feed everyone.
What you CAN do, is go to freaking other planets and moons. And the reason we should, is because it’s the most amazing thing that any living creature in the history of the planet has ever done.
We sent a dude up into space, in a tiny box, he got OUT of that box, drove around on the moon, got back into a box, and then flew back to earth. That shit is amazing. If that’s not worth doing, than literally nothing on earth is ever worth doing, and you midaswell just kill yourself.
We just missed it by a sliver here in Charlotte, NC. That was fun. They made a party out of it for work, so the bonus is getting some munchies in the middle of the afternoon.
Kind of a bust here. 91% coverage, but apparently 9% of the sun still makes it seem like late afternoon outside in terms of light levels and temps. We were hoping for more like twilight.
We managed to secure a couple of pairs of good eclipse glasses ($9 each…should have bought when they were $2 a month ago), and it was pretty impressive to see the event unfold over an hour or so through the glasses. My daughter and her friend were home with my wife and I, and they thought it was cool, but like us they were disappointed it wasn’t darker and more pronounced in effect. Ah well, we still can say we saw a near full solar eclipse in our lifetime. Pretty cool stuff.
And yeah, NASA rocks. Good thing we continuously cut their funding to pay for more planes and bombs, or we’d be living like The Jetsons by now.
The characterization in the Civ games of Apollo as a ‘Wonder of the World’ is exactly right. When everything else about American history is lost to time, it will be remembered – if anyone is around to remember – that we walked on the moon, and mapped the planets.
Nobody but a few historians knows which wars the Egyptians fought, or who won or lost. But the Pyramids still stand…
Down in Los Angeles we got about 60-something % coverage. As I biked to work I could tell it was darker, but it was in a very subtle way – almost as though it were slightly overcast. One of those ‘is it really darker, or am I imagining it?’ type of things.
I can sure see how a total eclipse would have been abso-fucking-lutely terrifying in pre-scientific times, mind you. It’s still deeply unsettling when the sky darkens in broad daylight.
We had completely overcast skies in Vegas - we get about a half dozen such days a year. Clearing skies appeared on the horizon as eclipse time neared, but they got here too late. We had 72% coverage, and so the final result was imperceptible. If I hadn’t already known what was happening, I wouldn’t have noticed anything different.
The partial eclipse we had a few years ago, which had about the same coverage and under clear skies, seemed far more pronounced.
I was in a roughly 80% zone … stuck inside, working. A bunch of people wandered out, though, and I had to take a … um … prolonged absence from my desk, lol. Yeah, it was darker, but not super-dramatic. I was lucky enough to be in a 100% zone when I was a munchkin, however, and that was a much bigger shift.
Yeah, pretty much. Like 75% coverage here and it was like, a slightly cloudy day.
