Eclipse mania
Might just be me but I feel underwhelmed by all the hype that's going on over the 8 April 2024 eclipse. Here in Britain it's only a partial one, and the sky is currently covered in cloud.
The last eclipse I saw was a few years ago, during the day when I was at work. We poured out into the office car park with a variety of special eclipse glasses and homemade "cameras" that projected the shadow of it onto a conveniently placed piece of paper. Huge fun and a lot of giggles, though most of us failed to see very much.
The best one I saw was when I was living in Oxford at the turn of the century. That was when the Moon passed in front of the Sun, and the birds went very silent in this strange, silvery, eerie light that was like moonlight in the middle of the day. Somewhere a couple of streets away a bloke standing on a rooftop shouted "The end of the world is nigh". You could understand why earlier civilizations found this frightening, and had rituals to placate celestial anger and avert bad luck.
Anyway - any eclipse memories of your own? Any thoughts on today's?
The last eclipse I saw was a few years ago, during the day when I was at work. We poured out into the office car park with a variety of special eclipse glasses and homemade "cameras" that projected the shadow of it onto a conveniently placed piece of paper. Huge fun and a lot of giggles, though most of us failed to see very much.
The best one I saw was when I was living in Oxford at the turn of the century. That was when the Moon passed in front of the Sun, and the birds went very silent in this strange, silvery, eerie light that was like moonlight in the middle of the day. Somewhere a couple of streets away a bloke standing on a rooftop shouted "The end of the world is nigh". You could understand why earlier civilizations found this frightening, and had rituals to placate celestial anger and avert bad luck.
Anyway - any eclipse memories of your own? Any thoughts on today's?
Comments
I briefly entertained driving to get to totality, but then thought about the inevitable traffic on the way home, and what the kids would be like in the car in that traffic, and thought better of it.
Yes. I remember that one, too. A very strange and eldritch experience - I daresay I wasn't the only person who secretly wondered what would happen if the Sun did not reappear...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2024/apr/08/ben-jennings-donald-trump-eclipse-sun-cartoon
Mr Heavenly took some fantastic photos.
Basically the world looked normal up to about 90, 95% of totality. Even the birds went on singing, and aside from the day looking a bit drabber than usual, you'd not notice the difference if you hadn't been told.
We pulled into an area between a couple of farm fields and sat on camp chairs with eclipse glasses my work was kind enough to provide to employees. Through the glasses you could safely watch the sun being eaten--first a cookie bite, then about half, then a gradually thinning orange crescent that shrunk visibly as we watched it. And then at totality, we took off the glasses, and glory.
I have never seen anything as pretty. The sky went a deep Easter egg blue, with two bright stars to either side of the sun--one I'm pretty sure was Venus, and I suspect the other might have been Mars, but will have to check up on charts and see. The birds went quiet and the wind came up a bit, the way it does at dusk, and whistled through the brush.
The moon was completely centered over the sun except for a split second when we had the "diamond ring" effect--where the tiniest bit of the sun shines through a valley on the moon and creates a large sparkle on the edge of the disk. And then that was gone, and all we could see was the sun's glory streaming off in all directions around the dark moon. There was a valley at the bottom of the moon that you could just make out during totality itself--we were looking through it sideways--like a tiny chip in the outline. I wish we had had a telescope, but what we could see was far more than enough. We watched it and talked for a couple minutes, and held hands.
And then the diamond ring came back, and we hurriedly put our glasses back on, and sat for another fifteen or twenty minutes watching the sun's crescent come back--this time on the bottom right of the disk. We wanted to wait to avoid the traffic, so I got to watch it return to about 25%--and on the way home, saw it back at 75% through the car sun-roof, looking like a cookie with a bite out of it.
It was a good day.
If only there was some way of predicting an eclipse in advance, so they didn't have to panic and try and get hold of eclipse glasses on the morning of. I'm sorry, although not entirely surprised, that you had angry people being abusive at you because of their lack of preparation.
We never got clear skies so never saw the actual eclipse, but we found a pretty spot by a pond to watch the darkness that fell so soddenly and disappeared just as suddenly. The two and a quarter minutes of totality were so eerie and beautiful. I’m so glad we made the trip.
Brockville had free parking and a shuttle bus available for viewers. The "party" as it were was down on Blockhouse Island on the St. Lawrence River waterfront. Worth every minute. There was a traffic jam going back to Ottawa on the 416 Expressway.
It's the Royal Canadian Air Force's 100th Anniversary and they were there with a pipe band and flyby and circuit from a C-130 Hercules transport aircraft out of the air base at Trenton ON.
Hey, are you a neighbor of Aurora? LOL. She's this amazing (to me, anyway) singer who lives in Bergen. Maybe you pop over to her house to borrow a bottle of beer? Off topic, I know. Sorry!
Back to eclipse talk...
I totally got why people get so excited about them. I would love to see a totality, but it is unlikely to happen.
And I can totally see why people who didn't expect it, had no idea what was going on, and just saw the effects even of a significant partial would have panicked. The sun is changing shape! I ask you.
Yesterdays - we were totally out of the path, so saw nothing at all.
This was very many years ago. I doubt I'll be back that way again.
I remember a considerable (I can't remember if it was total or not) in Edinburgh. But we did have some minutes of that eerie dark daylight, quite unlike a normal dusk.
My high school kid got in the car and marveled at the lighting (probably 90%+ covered at that point). "I can see stuff!" We went over to the grass, and she spent most of the time looking around and enjoying a serious break from photophobia she experiences from albinism. The closest we could see to totality in MI was about 96% coverage. But it was hardly dark. "Oh, look. There's stuff over there. The sidewalk has texture. I can see that curb. That's what the high school entrance looks like. Oh, I can see some details on the middle school. Look. My (transition lens) glasses didn't even get completely dark."
And then things started getting brighter by the time we got back to the car. Photophobia was returning.
As a small child I remember looking up at total solar eclipses in the late 1960s through pieces of tinted glass (not much protection) but don't recall much more. More memorable was Halley's Comet in 1986, we drove out with blankets and telescopes to watch it in the night skies over the Karoo.
Possess your soul (and your private jet) in patience for a couple of years:
The next total eclipse anywhere is 12 August 2026, covering large areas of the northern hemisphere, although totality will be limited to Greenland, Iceland, Spain, Russia and a small area of Portugal.
🌞
☀️🌓🌑
O well. Perhaps @Telford would do better to return his private jet to the seller...or maybe sell it on to Mr Sunak...
If I’m honest, I find lunar eclipses more interesting.
Don't I, Don't I
@Telford , you're where you should be all the time. But when you're not....
Yes, I agree.
Having experienced both a total solar eclipse and a total lunar eclipse, I find the latter much more eerie and otherworldly, in a way that speaks to something deep. But then, I feel a similarly about the night sky versus the day sky.
What a cool experience for her!
(I'm curious how this compared to dusk for her - the light level would have been pretty similar, but perhaps these places have bright lights on timers that come on at night?)
Glad that you, and she, enjoyed the experience.
Bring your winter woolies, its cold down there.
That’s a thought: if not dead will be definitely retired & a good excuse to visit the South Island ( sorry, Huia but can’t remember the correct nomenclature)
Gee, you could have crossed the bridge and come for lunch at our place.