The Great American Eclipse

[Lorizael]

Aw man. What did you get to see?

[BlackCat]

Would have been cooler if instead of the sun the Eye of Sauron would have shown up after the moon had passed....

Real life one-upped that

http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/...ry?id=49342319

[BeBMan]

[BeBMan]

This....




reminded me on this:





"Masaka is waking!"

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Eclipse

-I took a lot of crappy pics...

[-Jrabbit]

It was overcast here. It got slightly but noticeably darker, and it cooled a bit.

However, our intrepid WGN weather guru, Tom Skilling, made a pilgrimmage downstate to Carbondale's full-totality zone and was actually moved to tears...

I did see plenty of footage of idiots staring right at the sun.

[Lorizael]

However, our intrepid WGN weather guru, Tom Skilling, made a pilgrimmage downstate to Carbondale's full-totality zone and was actually moved to tears...

Carbondale is the only city (of any size anyone cares to report?) that gets totality for both the 2017 and 2024 eclipses.

I was not moved to tears, but I was wide-eyed and stunned and muttered "oh my" a lot.

[-Jrabbit]

Yeah, I noticed that on the 2024 map. Weird. Southern Illinois University is my alma mater.

[The Mad Monk]

Aw man. What did you get to see?

Well, the clouds never cleared, but I did see a crescent sun for a fraction of a second. Then a storm system parked on top of us and never did let up, but we noted the darkness on schedule and the crickets chirping, and the 360 degree sunset off in the distance.

[Lorizael]

Glad you got some of the eclipse experience. Better luck in 7 years!

I know some people come away from a total eclipse forever changed and spending the rest of their lives chasing eclipses. That didn't happen to me, but I will definitely do what I can to see the 2024 one. Witnessing totality was like seeing the solar system open up.

[The Mad Monk]

To 2024!

[Elok]

Totality is several hours' drive away from here, and the partial eclipse we got was obscured by clouds anyway. I'm told it was visible briefly, and my wife peeked at it through borrowed glasses for roughly two seconds. She said it looked like the sun with a bit taken out of it, and her eyes felt weird for an hour after. Maybe they weren't good glasses?

I looked up a video of totality on YouTube. It looked like somebody dipped the open end of a drinking glass in bleach, then plunked it down dripping on a black napkin. I'm guessing it's much more impressive when you see it in the sky.

[Lorizael]

Totality is several hours' drive away from here, and the partial eclipse we got was obscured by clouds anyway. I'm told it was visible briefly, and my wife peeked at it through borrowed glasses for roughly two seconds. She said it looked like the sun with a bit taken out of it, and her eyes felt weird for an hour after. Maybe they weren't good glasses?

Maybe, but more likely is that she was just paying attention to her eyes and noticing sensations she would normally ignore.

I looked up a video of totality on YouTube. It looked like somebody dipped the open end of a drinking glass in bleach, then plunked it down dripping on a black napkin. I'm guessing it's much more impressive when you see it in the sky.

The experience is difficult to describe and goes beyond what you can see. The temperature drops. The wind picks up. Before totality, the light slowly dims in an eerie way; the sun is still a blinding fireball in the sky, but everything around you is several shades darker. Shadows start doing funny things (becoming sharper, and having little crescents projected onto them). Then, in an instant, that all changes. I was looking through my binoculars up until the last moment and didn't catch the umbra wash over us. When the last bit of orange crescent vanished, I looked up again and it was twilight, with Jupiter and Venus piercing through the dark. Crickets came alive, birds leapt from trees, all that stuff.

And of course, there's the eclipsed sun. Your brain is just not prepared to see a perfect black disk hanging in the sky where the sun used to be. But beyond that, the sun has suddenly grown this flared out, delicate, gauzy white thing with definite structure. When you're so used to the sun being a featureless glare that you avoid, seeing its hidden outer atmosphere emerge and reach out at you from a hundred fifty million kilometers away is really something else.

Seeing Jupiter and Venus flank the sun was also incredible. All three celestial objects lay on the same line because in space they are in the same plane. The moon eclipsing the sun means those two bodies and the Earth are also in a plane together. So the whole structure and scale of the solar system pops into place and you feel like you're a part of it.

Then it's over. It doesn't fade away like a half-remembered dream. It just ends. There are a few seconds of twinkling at the edge of the black disk and you know you can't do anything to prolong the experience and before you can think of anything else to do it's daylight again.

[The Mad Monk]

There were a few other aspects I was interested in seeing that was noted in...The Old Farmers Almanac? Anyway, one was the supersharp shadows (like you could see each individual hair on your arm throwing its own shadow) that was apparently due to the sun's light output being reduced to a slit; another was moving, flickering shadows like you see at the bottom of a pool, which was due to the aforementioned slit combined with air currents -- this latter one being not often seen, and very difficult to image. Did you pick up on either of those? I know you said the shadows appeared sharper, but how much sharper?

[Lorizael]

The sharper shadows definitely weren't individual hairs sharp, at least not that I noticed. For me it was more that the lighting in general just seemed off. And near as I can tell, the shadow bands did not make an appearance where our group was situated. But another group we talked to later did see them in their driveway and it was apparently pretty freaky. They described it much as you did... like the shadows at the bottom of the pool, snaking around very rapidly.

[Fake Boris]

Honorary Darwin Award Candidate