Enjoying the eclipse.

We are at Son's house N of Ft Worth and the weather was perfect. Clear blue and in the high 70s. It did cool off a little and got a little darker during the full eclispe. What was cool was being able to see what was around the sun without glasses during the full portion.

The cat was looking forward to the eclipse.



It was cloudy, so she had to watch it on TV.

I had been complaining about how in our paper they kept saying how long the partial eclipse was going to last... having watched a number of sun and moon rises and sets I knew how fast they both actually move 'across the sky' and this just did not sound right..... but yesterday it kind of dawned on me ... I am a bit slow at times.... both the Sun and Moon are moving together.... (yes, I know it is really us that is moving mostly). but still it like two cars one trying to pass the other and they are both traveling at just about the same speed..... that partial lasted a pretty long time.

Still unsure of the 'big deal' of the eclipse. I was pretty busy and finally noticed a difference in the sunlight. Oh Yeah, the eclipse thing. I found an old welding helmet and looked and sure enough it was well past the 'total'. Put the helmet away and continued with the task at hand.

Despite being so informed, some apparently didn't believe that even 99% of totality was not enough to enjoy the actual sight of totality. We drove, with family, a few hours to a small Ohio town in the path of totality. We picnicked with other's there for the spectacle. The moment of totality was magical, with the sudden darkness, the sun reduced to a halo which could be viewed with uncovered eyes, for over 4 minutes of silence. This was my second, and almost surely last total eclipse. A very special experience.

A few days ago I whipped out my copy of "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" (Mark Twain) and read the section about the eclipse. That was entirely sufficient for my inquiring mind.

None of my pictures came out except the ones I took in the morning of the northbound traffic coming into the "zone", and of the darkness with bright horizons where the sun was shining 100 miles away and lighting up the distant atmosphere during totality. My phone would not go to infinite focus mode at totality and shooting through the eclipse glasses prior also resulted in just a bright fuzzy blob. I had my regular camera out there too, but while I remembered to switch it from Manual to Auto, I forgot to switch off the Macro mode (I mostly use it for gun pics), so it was also useless. I did make a pinhole camera beforehand and took some pics of the partial coverage looking into that and those came out OK.

I enjoyed the eclipse here in Oklahoma. I surfed the internet on my laptop while Smokey and the Bandit was on Netflix.

The full effect of a rare natural event is pretty awesome, IMO.
We had an extensive cloud cover but caught a few brief breaks, and the last one revealed the amazing totality.
It was very weird experiencing a sudden "sundown & sunrise" in the middle of the day, and it was enhanced by the near total silence of all the birds in the trees - followed by their noisy resumption.

We are quite a ways away from the path here, plus it was raining. The buds are swelling on my flowering crabs and redbud. Hopefully next week we will see an amazing natural event.

What?

spurgon said:

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Cancon, Tx

Great set of photos!
Thanks for sharing them,
Bet those solar flares are about the size of the Earth, and they are just small ones compared to the occasional whopper.

The pictures are great, but they don't capture the experience of seeing it with one's own eyes. As the eclipse is progressing, you have to use the special glasses which reduce the sun to a small white disk with the moon increasingly covering a portion of the sun. But when totality is reached it is truly an awesome sight. Suddenly the sun is fully covered by the moon and appears as just a black disk with a glowing halo of the sun's corona. Unlike the first eclipse that I witnessed, in 2017, where the period of totality was about 2 minutes, this time it was over 4 minutes. Staring at that sight with naked eyes as the world around us darkened to a level of late evening or early full night, with the sudden silencing of the birds and the sudden chirping of the crickets was something I am sure all of this there at the time will never forget.

As much as seeing the eclipse itself, it was a very special event for my wife and I, spending it with our two daughters, their husbands (both great son-in-laws) and a few of our 13 grandchildren. We made a 3 day outing of it, with a day's travel before and after, making it a short but very memorable vacation for us.