I think they said it was about 85% here. The cynic in me (ie everyone in track and field that is faster than me is on PEDs) thought it be dumb. It was actually kind of cool.
I think they said it was about 85% here. The cynic in me (ie everyone in track and field that is faster than me is on PEDs) thought it be dumb. It was actually kind of cool.
Anyone see the large cross in the sky the eclipse made in Salem, Oregon? If that is not a sign for you to wake up then I don't know what is.
I was on the path of totality in South Carolina. Partly cloudy here but fortunately the clouds didn't block it. It didn't seem like much would happen until a couple minutes from the total eclipse it got dark very quickly. The crickets started chirping. I admit it was pretty cool to look at with the goggles at the full eclipse stage.
Having experienced 2 totals and another that was rained/clouded out 70% was really of little interest. Watched the NASA feed with live shots of totality from around the country. The thing of interest to me is not the darkness but the unique moon/sun scale ratios that permit you to see the corona and the ring flash involved in totality.
I guess I'd travel to see another total, max 3 hours, by car and if I had friends in that area to visit.
Im not sure how to check the percentage but im in western portland oregon. We went out at work, sat on the curb with our glasses and watched it. There was a tiny sliver of sun still showing and we were all saying "here it comes, this is going to be awesome...... wtf? Its getting brighter!" It was cool, but we hyped it up too much, not knowing we wouldn't get 100%
Saw it just south of Portland. Wishing I had gone to Salem for total eclipse as I was so close & thought it wasn't worth hassle but it was totally worth it if I had it to do over. Weather typical perfect Oregon summer clear sky made for perfect viewing. Amazing how temp dropped 7 degrees in just a couple minutes.
87% here. Laughing at all the idiots who gathered to stare at some dim clouds.
93% here. Clear blue skies. I was at work where everyone was having lots of fun with the glasses and viewing shadows through fingers and strainers. The skies were darker in an eerie way. Shadows cast by the telephone lines were very dark and sharp. The roads were empty except for workers out the front.
Animals didn't go blind.
We had very clear skies and it was perfect.
I drove ~50 miles to reach one of the best possible locations (2:40 of totality).
I'm glad I did since anything less than total was very different to look at.
It was a bit hot standing around but got noticeably cooler in the 20 mins leading up.
Perfectly clear day.
Had to drive a bit but 90+ percent totality. Really neat. Shared eclipse glasses.
Rained...
100% here, a single cloud covered it completely during totality, big dissapointment
Complete darkness here....but then again, that's everyday :(
Central New Jersey, about 70%.
Women, children, and small dogs ran in fear down the street. Cicadas and bats swarmed to eat the insects that also swarmed. Cars swarmed to drive-in movies. Shopowners started closing their doors, thinking it was nighttime. All my clocks shut down, as did my computers. I instantly became sleepy and confused. The temperature dropped 60 degrees in 10 minutes and snow began to fall. Deer stopped in their tracks and stared at each other. Bears went to their dens to hibernate.
It was amazing.
Sucks to be you guys. Boosted down into the band just outside of Salem and parked the camping chairs at 7am in perfect open field with not a cloud in the sky. At 10.15am the temperature dropped like 20 degrees, there was a weird darkness and got 90 seconds of the most epic natural phenomena I think I will ever see in my lifetime. Just f&$kig epic. And btw it doesn't matter what percent you have unless it's 100. God bless Oregon
salvatorestitchmo wrote:
Sucks to be you guys. Boosted down into the band just outside of Salem and parked the camping chairs at 7am in perfect open field with not a cloud in the sky. At 10.15am the temperature dropped like 20 degrees, there was a weird darkness and got 90 seconds of the most epic natural phenomena I think I will ever see in my lifetime. Just f&$kig epic. And btw it doesn't matter what percent you have unless it's 100. God bless Oregon
I was skeptical, but wow it was incredible . I live in the totality path so I didnt have to go anywhere but now I understand why people travel far and wide to see one.
In SC - had about 2:30 of total but that went really fast. Really very interesting, unless you were looking at the sun with your glasses you would not have really noticed until well past 90%. About the only thing as epic as the eclipse was the traffic back to GA. Also eclipse glasses make terrible extra sun glasses for the car.
Annie Dillard "Total Eclipse" 1979:
The hill was 500 feet high. Long winter-killed grass covered it, as high as our knees. We climbed and rested, sweating in the cold; we passed clumps of bundled people on the hillside who were setting up telescopes and fiddling with cameras. The top of the hill stuck up in the middle of the sky. We tightened our scarves and looked around.
...East of us rose another hill like ours. Between the hills, far below, 13 was the highway which threaded south into the valley. This was the Yakima valley; I had never seen it before. It is justly famous for its beauty, like every planted valley. It extended south into the horizon, a distant dream of a valley, a Shangri-la. All its hundreds of low, golden slopes bore orchards. Among the orchards were towns, and roads, and plowed and fallow fields. Through the valley wandered a thin, shining river; from the river extended fine, frozen irrigation ditches.
...Now the sun was up. We could not see it; but the sky behind the band of clouds was yellow, and, far down the valley, some hillside orchards had lighted up. More people were parking near the highway and climbing the hills. It was the West. All of us rugged individualists were wearing knit caps and blue nylon parkas. People were climbing the nearby hills and setting up shop in clumps among the dead grasses. It looked as though we had all gathered on hilltops to pray for the world on its last day. It looked as though we had all crawled out of spaceships and were preparing to assault the valley below. It looked as though we were scattered on hilltops at dawn to sacrifice virgins, make rain, set stone stelae in a ring. There was no place out of the wind. The straw grasses banged our legs.
...It began with no ado. It was odd that such a well advertised public event should have no starting gun, no overture, no introductory speaker. I should have known right then that I was out of my depth. Without pause or preamble, silent as orbits, a piece of the sun went away. We looked at it through welders’ goggles. A piece of the sun was missing; in its place we saw empty sky.
...I had seen a partial eclipse in 1970. A partial eclipse is very interesting. It bears almost no relation to a total eclipse. Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane. Although the one experience precedes the other, it in no way prepares you for it. During a partial eclipse the sky does not darken—not even when 94 percent of the sun is hidden. Nor does the sun, seen colorless through protective devices, seem terribly strange. We have all seen a sliver of light in the sky; we have all seen the crescent moon by day. However, during a partial eclipse the air does indeed get cold, precisely as if someone were standing between you and the fire. And blackbirds do fly back to their roosts. I had seen a partial eclipse before, and here was another.
...Now the sky to the west deepened to indigo, a color never seen. A dark sky usually loses color. This was a saturated, deep indigo, up in the air. Stuck up into that unworldly sky was the cone of Mount Adams, and the alpenglow was upon it. The alpenglow is that red light of sunset which holds out on snowy mountaintops long after the valleys and tablelands are dimmed. “Look at Mount Adams,†I said, and that was the last sane moment I remember.
I turned back to the sun. It was going. The sun was going, and the world was wrong. The grasses were wrong; they were platinum. Their every detail of stem, head, and blade shone lightless and artificially distinct as an art photographer’s platinum print. This color has never been seen on Earth. The hues were metallic; their finish was matte. The hillside was a 19th-century tinted photograph from which the tints had faded. All the people you see in the photograph, distinct and detailed as their faces look, are now dead. The sky was navy blue. My hands were silver. All the distant hills’ grasses were finespun metal which the wind laid down. I was watching a faded color print of a movie filmed in the Middle Ages; I was standing in it, by some mistake. I was standing in a movie of hillside grasses filmed in the Middle Ages. I missed my own century, the people I knew, and the real light of day.
...I looked at Gary. He was in the film. Everything was lost. He was a platinum print, a dead artist’s version of life. I saw on his skull the darkness of night mixed with the colors of day.
...From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was detaching. It was a loosened circle of evening sky, suddenly lighted from the back. It was an abrupt black body out of nowhere; it was a flat disk; it was almost over the sun. That is when there were screams. At once this disk of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky. In the night sky was a tiny ring of light. The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring of light marked its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world. We were the world’s dead people rotating and orbiting around and around, embedded in the planet’s crust, while the Earth rolled down. Our minds were light-years distant, forgetful of almost everything.
...I have said that I heard screams. (I have since read that screaming, with hysteria, is a common reaction even to expected total eclipses.) People on all the hillsides, including, I think, myself, screamed when the black body of the moon detached from the sky and rolled over the sun. But something else was happening at that same instant, and it was this, I believe, which made us scream.
The second before the sun went out we saw a wall of dark shadow come speeding at us. We no sooner saw it than it was upon us, like thunder. It roared up the valley. It slammed our hill and knocked us out. It was the monstrous swift shadow cone of the moon. I have since read that this wave of shadow moves 1,800 miles an hour. Language can give no sense of this sort of speed—1,800 miles an hour. It was 195 miles wide. No end was in sight—you saw only the edge. It rolled at you across the land at 1,800 miles an hour, hauling darkness like plague behind it. Seeing it, and knowing it was coming straight for you, was like feeling a slug of anesthetic shoot up your arm. If you think very fast, you may have time to think, “Soon it will hit my brain.†You can feel the deadness race up your arm; you can feel the appalling, inhuman speed of your own blood. We saw the wall of shadow coming, and screamed before it hit.
This was the universe about which we have read so much and never before felt: the universe as a clockwork of loose spheres flung at stupefying, unauthorized speeds. How could anything moving so fast not crash, not veer from its orbit amok like a car out of control on a turn?
Less than two minutes later, when the sun emerged, the trailing edge of the shadow cone sped away. It coursed down our hill and raced eastward over the plain, faster than the eye could believe; it swept over the plain and dropped over the planet’s rim in a twinkling. It had clobbered us, and now it roared away. We blinked in the light. It was as though an enormous, loping god in the sky had reached down and slapped the Earth’s face.
Watched it from the national WWI memorial overlooking downtown Kansas City, MO. 99%+ totality and almost clear. The city lights all came on, which was interesting to see at 1pm, and the cicadas started chirping. The whole city seemed to let out a collective cheer, from several thousand watch parties, when it got dark. Very cool experience.
salvatorestitchmo wrote:
And btw it doesn't matter what percent you have unless it's 100. God bless Oregon
It is amazing how few people seemed to understand this. You get basically the same experience at 90% as you do at 10%. It was about 92% where I live, and I think the most notable thing was how much it cooled during the eclipse - temps dropped to 77 shortly after the peak, and were back up to 90 about an hour later. The other interesting thing is that the sky was completely clear before and during the eclipse, but then afterwards a bunch of big cumulus clouds appeared out of nowhere.