We Saw the Eclipse

Published: 2024-04-09 12:01 PM

Category: Life | Tags: eclipse, solar eclipse, travel

I don't really have words to express the feeling of seeing a total solar eclipse yesterday. I knew that I wanted to go after not being able to see the 2017 eclipse. I took the time off of school and we loaded the kids in the car to drive a couple hours south and set up for the day.

It was...unreal. There was so much to experience in our two minutes of total eclipse and it was hard to absorb everything. Everything from temperature change to how quiet it got was overwhelming.

I had an idea of what to expect during the totality, but what I didn't expect was the eerieness of the 98-99% coverage. The sun was still too bright to look at, but the atmosphere felt weird. I could tell that it was much darker than it should be and it felt like a really bad summer storm was rolling in. The light felt very strange and my body reacted with a bit of an adrenaline dump.

The other shocking part of the experience was the absolute blackness of the orb of the moon, like someone had taken a hole punch and popped a piece of the sky off. It wasn't at all like the Earthshine that illuminates some of the moon during the crescent phases - it was pure black nothingness that was overwhelming.

We were lucky to have a very bright corona swirling around the outside of the moons disc as well as Jupiter and Venus making appearances.

I tried to capture some of what I was feeling with some quick posts to Mastodon while my kids burned some energy off at a park on the drive home:

The fact that earth has these two orbs nearby AND one orb is huge relative to our planet size AND it's positioned in a way to look the same as the star that's just the right size, luminosity, and warmth to keep us all breathing.

It really is amazing that we have eclipses like this to witness at all.

Phil Plait talks about our local celestial arrangement in his book, Under Alien Skies noting that our star-planet-moon arragement may be unique, which is pretty overwhelming to think about in and of itself. Having seen a total eclipse now, I appreciate the uniqueness even more.