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Eclipse 2017


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I am out here in Missouri, close to Kansas City visiting my elderly parents and watching the eclipse. We started the morning with thunderstorms, but the sky cleared out in time for the show!

Solar Eclipse, 21 August 2017. Oak Grove Missouri.

Totality! The other bright light is the planet, Venus.

 

Solar Eclipse, 21 August 2017. Oak Grove Missouri.

This is 1 minute before totality.

 

Solar Eclipse, 21 August 2017. Oak Grove Missouri.

Crescent shadows beneath the trees.

Solar Eclipse, 21 August 2017. Oak Grove Missouri.

We were on the southern end of totality, so the southern sky was fairly bright. The street lights and little solar-powered landscape lighting did turn on.

Right before and right after totality we saw these crazy, wriggly shadows on the driveway.  They are called "Shadow bands ". Over all, it was a truly amazing experience. I saw solar prominences and the corona shooting out into space. Pictures could never do it justice.

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We were only at 92.5% here in CO and I opted not to make a crowded drive north to the WY border.  The one in 2045 will go right across the middle of CO, but I don't trust fate enough to assume I'll still be alive.  Instead, my husband and I are talking about taking a trip to Mazatlan for the 2024 eclipse.  They'll get totality there for about 4.5 minutes.  It also has the advantage of being a spot in Mexico that we haven't yet visited.

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I was on the 99.9999% line in Missouri just above Bloomsdale. Got to see 1 minute of corona before a damn heavy cloud got in the way. Yes, the orange horizon glow looked like sundown in every direction.

I had eclipse glasses, but once the corona shown, I didn't even need to use them or my regular sunglasses nor did I have to squint. It was clearly visible without hardly any intensity.

Edited by Lucia Nightfire
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2 hours ago, GoSpeed Racer said:

Solar Eclipse, 21 August 2017. Oak Grove Missouri.

Crescent shadows beneath the trees.

Thank you so much for the photos! Wow.

Sadly, Aussies were not treated to this wonder, but I had seen a total before when I was a child, I'd forgotten those crescent shadows, but your photos brought the experience back vividly. So, even though I didn't get to see it, I am thankful to you and for my American friends everywhere for sharing the rare event.

Amazing.

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The actual eclipse may be over, but if you have a 3rd-shift "day sleeper" in the house, you can still have a little fun with it.

a.. Turn off their alarm
b..  Set the clocks in the house back several hours
c..  Wait for full dark
d..  Wake them up screaming; "OMG! The Sun never came back !!!!!!"

Then back away......

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7 minutes ago, AmandaKeen said:

The actual eclipse may be over, but if you have a 3rd-shift "day sleeper" in the house, you can still have a little fun with it.

a.. Turn off their alarm
b..  Set the clocks in the house back several hours
c..  Wait for full dark
d..  Wake them up screaming; "OMG! The Sun never came back !!!!!!"

Then back away......

This is so something I would do...lmao

I have a friend, well, more of a friend of a friend, who was arguing that we did not have an eclipse today and it was all a government ploy. Oy vey! We were not in the path of totality, in fact we were at roughly 90%, and even then, it's a bit of an exaggeration. She lives not far from me, so I know quite well what we saw here, lol. She kept telling me, "but it didn't even get dark, the sun was still out, ended up getting a headache staring at the sun for a half an hour for nothing. It was all just a ploy from our government so people would buy the stupid glasses". She wasn't the only one that felt this way, I've come to find out from reading discussions about it, lol. 

Well, yeah, it's not like the sun just fell out of the sky for it(lmao), and not being in totality means we still see the sun(and could therefore hurt our retinas staring at the damn thing).  We didn't even have to be outside to notice when it started, because it DID actually get darker out, about as dark as it does during mid-day when a storm rolls in and heavy/thick/dark clouds roll over, and all of the shadows(as they do) changed. We had one advantage and that was no cloud cover at all, for miles and miles. People in cities around us were not that lucky. It was pretty cool. I'm not sure what people around here were expecting, to be honest.

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24 minutes ago, AmandaKeen said:

The actual eclipse may be over, but if you have a 3rd-shift "day sleeper" in the house, you can still have a little fun with it.

a.. Turn off their alarm
b..  Set the clocks in the house back several hours
c..  Wait for full dark
d..  Wake them up screaming; "OMG! The Sun never came back !!!!!!"

Then back away......

Boy, am I glad I was off last night and tonight, lmao!

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1 hour ago, Hunter Stern said:

got this shot on camera looking up the street, it was chilly briefly for those 2 minutes here near the coast in Oregon

ToledoTotality.jpg

Wonderful picture!  Even in the picture, that white is so bright it almost hurts my eyes to look right at it.   How fortunate you were to get such a good picture. 

We were not in the totality path, but even so, our fog (marine layer, as our weathermen call it) did not burn off until late afternoon.  It's hard to say whether it was darker than usual or not, but it was chillier than usual. Around 4:30 pm PST, we had a completely sunny blue sky - just in time for the evening marine layer to start heading back in :P.

Even though it wasn't visible, when I was walking my kindergarten grandson home from school, he was telling me all about it - they even made little paper models in class where they could move the moon over the sun. He was pretty excited about learning about it.   

 

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Just under 93% here in NC. My very first "Sciencey" memory was the partial in '59. My favorite uncle made a pinhole camera/shadow box for me. So I made two this time around for our 5 y/o granddaughter. She got "bored" and went inside to watch TV. Bleh! (KIDS!)

Thank you VERY much to those posting their pictures. ABSOLUTELY AWESOME!! I truly wish I'd been there with you.

2 hours ago, Tari Landar said:

I have a friend, well, more of a friend of a friend, who was arguing that we did not have an eclipse today and it was all a government ploy. Oy vey! We were not in the path of totality, in fact we were at roughly 90%, and even then, it's a bit of an exaggeration. She lives not far from me, so I know quite well what we saw here, lol. She kept telling me, "but it didn't even get dark, the sun was still out, ended up getting a headache staring at the sun for a half an hour for nothing. It was all just a ploy from our government so people would buy the stupid glasses". She wasn't the only one that felt this way, I've come to find out from reading discussions about it, lol. 

So the partial eclipse is a "Government Plot" to blind those too stupid to do a little thinking and reading on their own?

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3 hours ago, Darrius Gothly said:

So the partial eclipse is a "Government Plot" to blind those too stupid to do a little thinking and reading on their own?

I guess so, lol. Then again, everything today seems to be a government ploy against us. Sigh. Some people, I swear, I end up wondering how they manage day to day life, sometimes. 

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1 hour ago, Tari Landar said:

I guess so, lol. Then again, everything today seems to be a government ploy against us. Sigh. Some people, I swear, I end up wondering how they manage day to day life, sometimes. 

"Warning: The Hot Coffee in this cup is Hot" kinda person?
"Do not use Electric Blow Dryer in the shower" kinda person?
"Soap Bar is slippery when wet" kinda person?
"Do not wear Eclipse Glasses while driving" kinda person?

Yup .. I sometimes wonder too. *SIGH*

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2 hours ago, Darrius Gothly said:

"Warning: The Hot Coffee in this cup is Hot" kinda person?
"Do not use Electric Blow Dryer in the shower" kinda person?
"Soap Bar is slippery when wet" kinda person?
"Do not wear Eclipse Glasses while driving" kinda person?

Yup .. I sometimes wonder too. *SIGH*

I realize that the company's need the warning signs to protect them from lawsuits - because our legal system is so screwed up - but I really wish they'd do away with them and let nature take its course.

Yes, I'm heartless to stupidity.

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6 hours ago, Darrius Gothly said:

"Warning: The Hot Coffee in this cup is Hot" kinda person?
"Do not use Electric Blow Dryer in the shower" kinda person?
"Soap Bar is slippery when wet" kinda person?
"Do not wear Eclipse Glasses while driving" kinda person?

Yup .. I sometimes wonder too. *SIGH*

I have a mental image of turkeys staring up at the rain and then drowning.....

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I promised I wasn't going to distract myself with technology during the eclipse, so Mom and I could just plop down in the middle of nowhere (a field just outside of Hopkinsville, KY) and soak it all in. But I did my put my two DSLRs on a tripod and set each to take a three shot bracket exposure at different starting exposure levels. I triggered the cameras by remote control while on the grass next to Mom during totality, so I was not 100% in the moment, but pretty close. The result was that four of the six shots are garbage and two are okay. The keepers are below, cropped from a much larger piece of noisy sky. I wish I'd had the presence of mind to take a "dark frame" image and tell the camera to save RAW format images... or buy a better camera. I'll do that, or nothing, for 2024.

The shot on the right is almost as it appeared to the naked eye. I recall seeing more corona than in the picture, which is the least underexposed of that batch of three. The shot on the left shows more corona than I saw, and the interior is clearly blown out. That overexposed shot is the least overexposed of the three from that camera, so the sweet spot was not within the range of exposures I captured, proving that I don't know what I'm doing. I desaturated the images so I wouldn't have to look at the chromatic aberration from my cheap lenses. Imagine the sky is blue, not black and that the view was lovely, not clinical. I'm an engineer, not an artist.

599cc85a255a6_Eclipse2017.thumb.jpg.b4914072516bce31e9f622df4a9f7d88.jpg

Though this was our first total solar eclipse, there were no surprises. I'm an amateur astronomer and we have both witnessed partials. On the long drive to Kentucky, we discussed what we'd heard about total eclipses and what we wanted to experience during this one.

When we got there, we sat down in the grass on the side of the road in the mottled shade of a line of trees, just a few feet from a clear view of the sun. We looked and listened to establish a baseline for sights and sounds of the area. The cicadas in Kentucky are a hell of a lot more boisterous than those in my yard (they were the loudest sound almost everywhere we went yesterday), partly driven by the 91F breeze and partly by a difference in species. (We noticed on the way home that we could anticipate the sound of the cicadas by the look of the tree they were in, so different species of bug seem to prefer different species of tree.)

The cicadas started to go quiet as the sky darkened. The birds remain active, though their chirping was more subdued during totality. The myriad chirping bugs at ground level lowered both their pitch and amplitude as sunlight reaching the ground faded and the grasses and the bugs themselves cooled. I hear that effect every summer when big clouds drift slowly over neighborhood fields, or when I bicycle past a cloud/sun line in a field. The cicadas flipped back on almost instantly as the sun reappeared, that was impressive.  The ground level bugs were slower to respond (because they were responding to temperature, not light) and the birds seemed to be too peeved to return to their pre-eclipse chatter.

The dimming of the environment during any significant eclipse is eerie, because the sky dims without changing color temperature. We're accustomed to the warmer colors of twilight as a low sun passes through more atmosphere, becoming redder. This sun was directly overhead and casting the harsh white of midday at much reduced intensity. The changes just before and after totality are so rapid you can't miss them. It's as if nature is telling you dinner is ready by dimming the chandelier over the dining room table. You really do notice the rapid dimming and brightening.

During totality, the corona looks just as you've seen on the web. The stars and planets come out. Venus (GoSpeed captured that in her shot) was the first to appear and that's Rigel (or one of several party balloons we spotted floating by) on the left in my photographs. We got two brief glimpses of the "diamond ring", once at the onset of totality as the last of the direct rays provide the diamond to the corona's rapidly appearing ring. The second glimpse occurred at the end as the first direct rays produced another diamond on the opposite side as the ring faded into the waxing skylight. Just after the leading diamond vanished, we switched from solar binoculars to regular. We caught, or imagined, a glimpse of Baily's Beads. At the onset of totality, I set a timer for two minutes to guarantee we'd put down the regular binoculars before the sun reappeared. After that, we watched to the end of totality with naked eyes, looking away as the sun reappeared.

So we got a grand slam yesterday, witnessing everything we'd expected, more or less as we'd expected it. And that includes feeling an overwhelming sense of awe, insignificance in the face of the grandness of the universe (or at least our tiny piece of it in space and time), and a connection to all the living things around us who, oblivious to what was happening, were compelled to respond nonetheless. And, as I warned my Mom, who like me is not prone to tears, the sun and moon dancing together managed to bring out one in each of us.

The drive down to Hopkinsville started at 2AM Monday and took a little over nine hours, as expected. The big surprise of the trip was that the return home, which I expected to take 10 hours (due to exit traffic) actually took... sixteen. That's a whole 'nuther story which needs a bit more time to cool before it's ready for telling.

 

Edited by Madelaine McMasters
Cuz what I read wasn't what I thought I wrote.
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