Solar Eclipse

Like millions of other people, I traveled to see the total eclipse on April 8.

I saw the annular eclipse in 2014 from my hometown in California. That was my first eclipse experience, and it was pretty cool. We weren’t in the path of totality, but we were close enough to experience the mid-day twilight and to see the light come through the trees to throw little crescents of sunlight on the ground.

I promised my son that we’d go to the 2017 total eclipse, because the totality was going through Oregon and at that point we were spending a lot of time in Portland. But Portland wasn’t in the path, and the idea of camping in eastern Oregon to see it, with about a million other people? No, thank you. Plus that was a year that my pelvis was surgically broken in three places, and if there’s any time I’d rather go camping less than all the time, it’s when my pelvis is healing from being intentionally fractured in three places.

This year, though. My daughter already lives in Cleveland, and we go there pretty often. It’s a nicer city than you’ve heard about. So about eighteen months ago, when I first learned the eclipse would be happening, I booked our accomodations.

We watched from a college campus, which was handing out free eclipse glasses and also had an MC who let us know when we could take the glasses off and when we had to put them back on. There was an hour or so of eclipse happening before there was really anything exciting to see. A surprisingly large portion of the sun has to be blocked before you start to notice a difference in the ambient light. In the ten minutes leading up to totality, you could watch a sliver crescent of sun shrink to a curved line that looked like it was drawn in red neon (thanks to the tint of the glasses). The curved line shrank from both sides until it became a single point, and went out.

Then we had four minutes during which we could look straight at the sun with our naked eyeballs.

Photos really can’t do it justice. My phone captured this photo of totality:

but that is not what it looked like with the naked eye at all. The sky wasn’t black, it was a dark, dusky blue, and the sunlight wasn’t so smudgy. It was amorphous, a misty veil blowing outward from the center of the moon. Like this:

which is a composite photo I borrowed from this informational webpage.. This looks exactly like what I saw, except that our eclipse also had a tiny red dot at the bottom that gradually grew into an arc as the sun moved on.

I’ve heard a lot of people describe the experience as total darkness, like midnight, but that was not what I saw. The entire horizon, in all directions, was still lit up–presumably because it was outside the path of totality. It as like sunset, if the sun could set in all directions at once.

It was very cool to see, and I’m glad we went, not least because I felt like I finally kept my eight-year-old promise to my son. I don’t think I’m going to become one of those people who travels around the world chasing eclipses, though. Once was sufficient.