Ten Brilliant Observations of the 2024 Eclipse

      It was about six months ago, I read somewhere about the coming eclipse and was delighted to see we were just inside the path of the moon's shadow. Good thing it came to us-- Mr. SFO and I do not travel, especially do not travel in traffic, and most decidedly do not travel in traffic where any sort of crowd might be involved. In fact, it's unlikely that we would walk 50 feet up the road to get a better view of any given thing. To borrow from Jane Austen, "There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort."  

    The DD and SIL are young and feel differently-- they wanted to travel to the top of a mountain. I had to convince them that wouldn't really be much closer to the event... and because we were on the very edge, I also had trouble convincing everybody we would be in TOTALITY. (So fun to say that word, is it not-- I'm going to miss it!) Here's a diagram I drew in my embroidery software to explain it to them.

   They were still skeptics-- as the days drew closer, I eventually found a chart listing all the towns in the U.S. and was able to definitively prove we would be in glorious TOTALITY for 45 seconds. It's so awesome to be right all the time, isn't it!?

     I had been watching the weather for days ahead of time-- there was not a cloud in the sky, and you have no idea how unusual that is for these parts at this time of year-- the sun has been in full eclipse behind the clouds for months now. With temperatures in the 60s for the first time in forever, the weather was truly a gift.

    So here's my brilliant observations-- I do apologize for acting like no one has ever seen an eclipse before, but I've never seen an eclipse before. But honestly, I didn't hear anyone give the in-depth analysis, as you're about to read, anywhere on TV. Enjoy.

1. The sun is bright. So we heard a thousand times before any discussion of the eclipse-- DO NOT LOOK DIRECTLY AT THE SUN. How do you even do that? It hurts and you can't even see it anyway-- thank goodness, or we'd have a lot of blind people stumbling around. It's just too bright. One thing that surprised me is, even with just a sliver of a crescent of a sun, it's still too bright to look at. (I guess I will have to confess to trying to peek through my fingers with extremely slitted eyes to discover this and I'm happy to say my corneas are still intact today) Then magically and only when in TOTALITY, we could finally look up. So that brings me to brilliant observation #2--

2. Those overpriced, cheap paper glasses were worth it. This is really the only way you can look at the sun. But you can't see anything else through those glasses, so I questioned how long I'd really want to have them on before I fell into a ditch. On the contrary-- it was fun to look at the sun in the middle of the day for the first time in my life. And see it gradually getting chipped away. Heck, I may even pull those glasses out from time to time this summer to see if the sun's still there.

3. The sun is small. When you finally can look up at it, for all that light and heat, it's pretty surprising how small our sun is! Think about it-- for the moon to cover it, it would have to be small. I think I understood, in that great big sky, why it's a rare event when the moon is passes directly in front of it.

4. Celestial events are SLOW. So it took a long time for the moon to cover the sun-- we went out about 2:00pm and our TOTALITY wasn't until 3:30pm. I'd hate to admit how many times I reached for the dreaded cell phone during the once in a lifetime event. Granted, I was texting other people about it. How fast does the moon travel? Slow. In a nod to our weird northern location, the moon seemed to be traveling from right to left as I watched TV in Mexico, but where we are it went from the bottom to the top. Very strange.

5. Celestial events are FAST. It really didn't get super dark until TOTALITY. Things started to look weird about 20 minutes before. The light was kind of yellow and red but not quite like a sunset. All the shadows had fuzzy edges. I stood up at that point, as if to get a better look. For perspective, the series of  four photos you are looking at are just about 10 minutes of time, out of the whole two hour event.

6. TOTALITY was beautiful. I even understood for a moment why you would suffer travel, traffic, and crowds to view such a thing. A perfect golden ring hovered in the sky, then a "star" popped out. You can see it to the lower right of the sun-- someone on Facebook told me it was Venus. We were all transfixed for a moment.

7. We have more and closer neighbors than we thought. We were all wondering what the animals would do-- the chances of us hearing nighttime insects here is 0% right here now with the temperatures. (Believe me, after just one warm day, that is about to change.)  But after a moment of silence, a great noise came up-- was it howling wolves? Honking geese? Our chickens? No-- it was people! We heard a great cheer echo over the pond and another group up the road. I was tempted to yell myself, but Mr. SFO is sensitive to noise and I didn't want to waste any of my 45 seconds. The chickens did not even bat an eyelid-- just kept pecking away! Like, "Yeah-- it's just a dumb eclipse, people. Where's my corn?"

8. The cold temperatures and wind are a thing. Okay, so maybe not the wind-- we had that anyway. But I went from pulling out deck furniture and running for suntan lotion to freezing again-- I almost thought I'd miss the eclipse by running in for my down coat! It seemed like we got about a minute of view, then that little bead of light cracked out from the bottom of the sun and it was time to don our glasses once again. The whole process reversed itself over the next hour. (Slowly scroll back up to experience it!)

9. It's fun to do something different for a day. I definitely dropped some baggage I've been carrying around for one sweet afternoon. And, (philosophical thought warning!) for a couple of blessed hours, the entire country was looking in the same direction with optimism.

10. Chocolate cake is good way to celebrate anything. (Thank you, C.W., for that thought!) I thank the Lord for my DD and SIL everyday-- they fired up the grill, and we enjoyed our first hamburgers, baked potatoes, and pasta salad of the summer. The DD even made a celebratory cake-- here it is in TOTALITY.

And here's a view of the beautiful, sprinkled "corona." 

And my "sunshine" rising over the moon once again. Awesome day!

So that's the once in a lifetime event over! It's hard to get back down to Earth this morning as I write. I have a three-hour appointment to get my windshield replaced and two sets of Form 1040 to get done this week. 

Remember, every day is a "once a lifetime"-- let's make the most of them.

xox

Carol