General Science, Humor, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Space Science, Technology and Society

The Eclipse In Southern California

10 Comments

Would have liked to see totality (guess it remains on the bucket list, maybe 2024 or somewhere else sooner), but we got about sixty percent coverage here. There was a thick marine layer when we awoke, but the clouds broke up in time for us to watch the whole thing. As I saw the moon slice along the left side of the sun, it was easy to imagine it projecting the full shadow a thousand miles north. I took a picture of a natural pinhole camera with hundreds of crescents in our driveway.

A few of my eclipse jokes on Twitter:

10 thoughts on “The Eclipse In Southern California”

  2. I distinctly remember around 25 years ago a mother screaming at her children “Don’t look at it!” It was a lunar eclipse.

  3. I told several people, talking about ways to watch the eclipse; “just walk outside to the nearest tree and look on the ground”. I remembered it from the 1984 annular eclipse.

  4. Went to Murphy, NC to be in the path of totality. Weather was great, and totality was an amazing experience.

  5. A comedian could have a field day with jokes about what black folks were going to do when all the white people were looking up. ^_^

  6. Everyone focused so much on the sun but to me, looking out at the horizons would be the cool part if I was in totality.

    Sorry NASA but I can take a picture of an eclipse with my cell phone and not have it look like an orange smudge. Even though we were only 90 something percent, no animals freaked out either. Did anyone run out of food, gas, or electricity? I am glad all the histrionics are over. Well, mostly over.

    2. Prior to Monday, I thought that too – that the horizons and the dark sky would be the most cool part. I experienced the totality under clear skies in a rural area on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi not at all far from Carbondale.

      Oh my God, that was the most amazing surreal crazy thing I’ve ever seen, and yes, the suddenly darkened sky, and venus at a bizarrely high spot in the sky, and the cars with headlights on (who keeps driving during an eclipse?) and the crickets, and sunset-like horizon were all really cool, but….

      ….to see the impossibly black moon in front of the sun, in real life, in the sky, it just left me feeling like I wasn’t really even on Earth – like I was in the best science fiction book I’ll ever read – seeing the sun and moon like that was utterly astonishing and left me entirely awed.

  7. I was in the path of totality. It was spectacular, with a large visible corona. There was even a tiny sparkling white/red prominence on the lower right side of the eclipsed sun.

    I had planned to see the eclipse in Missouri (after visiting daughter in St. Louis) but the weather forecast there was unfavorable. I instead drove four hours east to Hopkinsville, KY. Clouds were sparse and the totality was unobscured.

    And then, right after the eclipse, it was the mother of all traffic jams. I had to stop for the night in Terre Haute; the drive out of KY was at an average of less than 10 mph (and Verizon’s network was mostly unusable, even for text messages at times.)

Comments are closed.