The Glade 4.0

Anyone have a chance to see it? Have any good stories?

I'll be uploading some pics soon.

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We had around 88% totality locally, so I passed around my glasses to a bunch of folks at the office. Yep, it was a thing.

I'll take the 2024 one more seriously, as Dayton will be in the path of totality naturally.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

I looked at it with normal sunglasses and am still enjoying it today.

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The Dude abides.

Been planning this trip for over fifteen years.

We only managed to convince one of the kids to go - my daughter - and brought my son in law and their son as well. Staged for Sunday night in Savannah, GA, and headed out early Monday morning.

Did a lot of analysis work on traffic, weather, climate, etc... months ago, had everything prepared and ready to rock. Built a sun funnel for the Transit of Venus in 2012, and was able to use it for this event (remember that? viewtopic.php?f=2&t=8667 ). The sun funnel really worked out, actually. The whole group was able to watch it safely and without glasses. We had enough pairs of eclipse glasses, but trying to convince a 3-year-old to only look at the sun with the glasses on was a little tricky... but looking at the sun funnel was a piece of cake.

https://eclipse2017.nasa.gov/make-sun-funnel

We drove to Cross Hill, South Carolina. Planned a great route that would keep us from seeing any traffic - and boy did that ever work! I don't think we saw five cars total on some of those back, back, back roads. Very nice little town. 600 people, three streets. Stopped at a little church, where probably a hundred other people were.

From first contact until maybe 50%, the skies were dotted with clouds but visibility was good. At 50%, we hit a big ol' cloud that obscured vision until down in the 20% range, and then the clouds stayed away after that.

Actual totality was perfect. Just perfect. Everyone turned into raving lunatics. I heard someone screaming and yelling near me, and then realized it was me. Darkness fell swiftly. We managed to see shadow bands, which are pretty rare, apparently. https://www.thrillist.com/news/nation/s ... nds-snakes

Going from 99.9% to actual totality is a world of difference. The whole crowd was whooping and hollering and gasping. After the excitement died down, everything got completely silent (except the crickets). Birds went to roost, crickets started chirping. Parking lot lights came on. Temperature dropped ~10 degrees. Even the clouds seemed like they deflated. You could see Venus, and some stars. The horizon, 360 degrees around, was like a deep sunset. The rest of the sky was the deepest possible midnight blue. And that orb in the sky, a perfect black disk surrounded by white haze, looked like it was about 30 feet off the ground.

The pictures don't do totality justice; none of them I've seen anywhere have done it. A total solar eclipse is 10000x better than any picture on any website.

The drive home was awful. We had to stop in Orlando to drop someone off, so I thought we'd at least make it to there before sunrise. Instead, after 8 hours of driving in South Carolina at 5mph, we called it a night and waited out the traffic. I-26 and I-95, as well as many side roads, were just jam packed with the most people I've ever seen.

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Planning:




Pre-totality:



Actual pics from the sun funnel. It was so easy to view, and decent quality (you could see sunspots)



Totality. I don't have a better picture yet until we load them off the camera. This was taken with a smartphone from a picture on the viewfinder on the back of the camera (picture of a picture)

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I think that if you were interested at all about the eclipse, you'd love the northern lights. The wonder of those lights really moved me.

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In time, this too shall pass.

Yes, those are amazing. I saw a fantastic display back in '91. It was an unbelievable three-hour show of greens, reds, purples, and whites. Now that I'm in the South, it's a little trickier to try to plan a trip to see them unless we go *really* far north.

Having seen both, I'd say the aurora is a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10, and the total solar eclipse was a 12.

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You know, I've seen both but I feel the opposite. Aurora were far and away more interesting to me. Maybe because the physics is so much more interesting to me. An eclipse is just a shadow. The whole solar flare/magenetic field interaction is far more extraordinary to me.

We just got back from Yellowstone 2 weeks ago. We're just outside the edge here; 2 weeks earlier and we'd have seen it in all its glory.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I was at the medical center preparing for a colonoscopy. Just for to see pictures and video later.

Good news so far from the procedure. One small polyp, probably benign. Awaiting test results on that.

The joys of getting older.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

I know that joy all too well Micheal.

Someday I will be heading north to see the aurora and do some fishing in Montana's lakes and rivers...oh, and I might even visit my brother and sister

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"Said I never had much use for one, never said I didn't know how to use one!"~ Matthew Quigley

"nothing like a little meow in bed at night" ~ Bruskey

"I gotta float my stick same as you" Hondo Lane

"Fill your hand you son of a *****!"

Good luck with your pooper.

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The Dude abides.

Got the images of totality off the camera...

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Drove down about 400 miles into Eastern Oregon to view it with my brother and a buddy of ours. Ended up camping on a forest service road about 50 miles south of Baker City, very near the center line. There was next to NO ONE there. Was kinda nice compared to reports we saw about traffic and general crowding that was happening further west in Oregon. Beautiful country, for sure.

The eclipse itself was a trip! We hiked up onto a rise above our campsite that had a clear view (free from trees). We had a nice panorama to the west and south, as the mountains dropped away in those directions and we could see rather far to the west. This was nice as it allowed us to look for the oncoming shadow. It started getting noticeably darker about 30 minutes before. The light had a quality not unlike dusk, but rather surreal since the light was coming from directly above rather than the horizon.

As the totality got closer, the quality of the dimming light got even stranger. We were commenting that it seemed like some kind of acid trip or something. In the final seconds the darkness rushed up from the west and engulfed us.

During totality it was like a full moon night. Temperature dropped immediately about 10 degrees (guessing). The stars and planets appeared in the sky, and the crickets started chirping. There are plenty of images out there of the sun itself, but it was quite something to observer in person. I've certainly never seen anything like it. The swirling bright corona around the black-hole center was crazy looking.

TL;DR: it was pretty awesome and worth the trip to get inside the path of totality!