We sat out in the driveway and watched the light drop, occasionally tracking its progress with our two pieces of cardstock. The last 30 minutes before maximum (99.001%), it seemed like we were on another planet with an older sun because while it was dim, the light was not reddish but instead had a green-blue-gray cast to it. About 5 minutes before maximum, the driveway suddenly was ablaze with sparks as the combination of low light and the sun overhead set off all the silica in the concrete. Things didn’t get as dark as totality of course, but the couple of minutes on either side of maximum, everything was so eerie; everything was slightly the wrong color, and the cicadas had replaced the songbirds. The sky to the north was a deep blue. Then the light started to rise again.
My 6 year old was singularly unimpressed by the little crescent spot of light at the bottom of the cereal box (@70% coverage) Said he liked looking up at the moon a lot more.
Well, we’ll get proper glasses for the totality in 7 years.
Sky cleared about 20 mins before totality here in Lexington SC. Properly amazing.
We were at the lake too!
I was out of contact for a few hours, but diverted from St. Louis towards Carbondale, pulling up short at Lake Kincaid near Murfreesboro.
Was the right call, was perfectly clear there. Pics later.
We were very lucky, went to the isle of palms, just down the coast from Charleston, SC and it was pretty cloudy until the total eclipse when the clouds cleared up. Amazing spectacle!
Thank god someone made me take off work to watch this. I’d seen eclipses before, but seeing the totality was something else entirely. I wish I’d spent more of those 2 minutes looking directly at it with the naked eye, but, despite all the assurances, I was too nervous to look at the corona for more than a couple seconds at a time. Feel a bit like I bungled it.
Yeah, it was striking how much sunlight still came through, even at the 94% coverage we had here. The other thing that surprised me was how freakin’ small the sun appeared, looking directly at it through the glasses.
I loved the fish-scale effect, looking at the light on the ground through the leaves.
The “shadow bands” in the moments just before and after the totality were really eerie. Nobody mentioned them so I was really caught off guard. I was especially surrpised to read afterwards that scientists don’t know the cause of them:
https://eclipse2017.nasa.gov/exploring-shadow-bands
George B. Airy, the English astronomer royal, saw his first total eclipse of the sun in 1842. He recalled shadow bands as one of the highlights: “As the totality approached, a strange fluctuation of light was seen upon the walls and the ground, so striking that in some places children ran after it and tried to catch it with their hands”
Pretty neat. It wasn’t dark here but the change in the level of brightness and glare was interesting.
Here’s my cellphone pic of the totality from Salem Oregon. Does not do it justice. It was simply amazing.
88% coverage where I’m at, but there were so many clouds (complete cloud coverage) that it never got very dark. It wasn’t even “during a rainstorm” dark out, I assume from diffusion through the clouds by the 12% that still got through.
That’s a great shot.
Talked my wife out of that park from the online description so the kids could play and we ended up at Herdklotz park instead. After seeing your pictures of that crowd, I’m pretty glad we did! :)
Hahaha
The solution to Neil’s dilemma is simple. Send robot people!