In our back yard in Durham it was noticeably less hot. Almost pleasant. For a few fleeting moments, anyway.
We used a cereal box viewer. It took some tweaking to make it satisfactory. I tried simply poking a hole in the foil with a pen, a pin, an awl, a screw. Each of those gave me a pinhole with square corners, because of the way the foil folded. Finally I put duct tape on both sides of the foil, then sandwiched it between two boards and drilled a hole in it. That gave me a beautifully round hole.
At one point some clouds passed in front of the sun, and the camera obscura view of that was maybe cooler than the eclipse itself.
You CANNOT remotely get how eerie and majestic the moon-disk and corona are from a photo. Seeing this damned unnatural but totally real thing in the sky above a Oregon valley was beyond trippy. Just amazing.
A couple of hours after totality we were launching rockets as part of an eclipse day science event. Odd to go back to this (for my) quotidian activity after such an amazing sight.
I hitchhiked to Madras to get into the totality zone.
It would take some kind of “high dynamic range” photography to get a good picture of the corona. But beyond that, things you don’t see in these photos: The sky was not black. It was a twilight blue. Logically the dark side of the moon should have also been this same dark blue color, but the moon totally looked black. It must have been an optical illusion created by the relatively bright inner edge of the corona.
I wound up making an 800-mile day trip yesterday, from the Chicago area down to Princeton, Kentucky and back. It was absolutely Worth. The. Trip. to go… and I lucked out on the weather. About 40 miles north of me, there was a towering thunderhead, but no storms headed my way. The effect of totality is downright spooky; 360-degree twilight is a sight to see.
Lesson learned: take a DSLR instead of a point-and-shoot - you need full manual control of focus, shutter speed, and aperture, and I couldn’t get a manual-focus mode out of my point-and-shoot. At least I won’t have to travel as far for the 2024 eclipse.
Southbound traffic on I-57 in the morning was moderately heavy but not bad. I did a fair bit of back-roading on the way home, and that turned out well. It was amusing to see small parades of cars on rarely-traveled county blacktops. I stopped for dinner in Champaign and then Google Maps kindly routed me around a bad jam on I-57 between Rantoul and Paxton.
Haters exist in multitude because “hating” is oh-so-easy; it requires no talent, intellect or any other desirable virtue - literally anyone can do it, and with the internet such folks have the false illusion of “safe anonymity .”
ANOTHER THING: A bit before totality the planet Venus came out. That is, the sky became dark enough you could see the planet in the sky. From Oregon it looked like it was almost straight up. AN ECLIPSE IS THE ONLY TIME WE CAN EVER SEE VENUS NEAR THE ZENITH. For some reason this one detail really blew my mind.
We drove 800 miles to Owensville, Missouri for the eclipse and ran into someone who lives 4 miles away from me. And yes, worth the drive to see the total eclipse. My photo:
