Let’s start with a joke I made up:
How do you know the moon is mad during a total solar eclipse?
Because it’s throwing shade at the whole world!
Hahahahahaha… Ha ha ha... Ha… heh. Ahem.
During the actual total solar eclipse of April 8th, my family and I were able to make the pilgrimage to the holy city of Cleveland, Ohio, with hopes of witnessing the event. We arrived the day before at Mark and Sabrina’s house, a mere seven years after I had first made our reservation, and settled in to chat, and to give the obligatory pets to their elderly gentlemen dog, B.K. – to be clear, petting the dog is not a house rule, but a compulsion. B.K. is from the older, noble generation of canines that are more interested in testing the firmness of their (many) dog beds to any type of ruckus-making.
It had been a long trip, and a long wait, for this moment. At around 3 PM Eastern Time, we settled in at a nearby middle school to watch the eclipse.
I had bought a universal solar filter for my camera, but it turns out universal means “only if you have a sunshade attached.” Which I didn’t, so there was no way to secure the filter.
“Just use a pair of your socks,” Mark suggested. “Wrap it around the lens and then put the filter over them.”
“Mark,” I said in a voice filled with gravitas, “you’re a genius.”
It worked to a point, to be fair, but it turned out to be hard to focus, and even worse was that I couldn’t zoom out to even find the sun as the socks were blocking the telephoto lens from properly retracting. In the end I wound up taking the filter off completely, using it to line up where the sun was and then bringing the camera up and into the filter, holding them together while I took photos.
Pretty such this is how NASA’s sun photography started out.
The biggest fear of mine was the weather. The forecast leading up to the event was foggy (heh) about the conditions for the day, bouncing around between mostly sunny to overcast to clear to partly cloudy with a chance of meatballs, etc.
When we walked over, it was actually perfect weather: bright, sunny, and not a cloud in the sky. But as the eclipse progressed more and more high-altitude clouds started moving in, and I was legitimately starting to get worried.
As it turns out, though, the sun is really, really bright. Even with the cloud cover you couldn’t look directly at the sun without the solar glasses, and even with them on it was so bright that there was no sign of any clouds; the sun was crisp like a fresh apple and clear like a, uhm, an invisible fresh apple.
One thing the clouds did spoil, however, were the shadows. May and I spent a couple of hours prepping some hole-punched name cards: we punched out letters with a hole puncher, and then rearranged them to spell out the names of all of us (except for B.K., as he was not going to be accompanying us to the event) and attached them to a cardboard frame so that you could hold it up and the sun would cast a shadow with your name spelled out in dots. The goal here was that during the eclipse, holding up the nameplates, instead of solid circles you would see crescents of sunlight, mimicking the actual eclipse.
But it didn’t work for us, and Mark theorized that the clouds were probably scattering / filtering the sunlight enough to prevent the effect from happening. It was a bummer, and I guess you could say that our little experiment led to a “hole” lot of nothing! Ha!
Oh, I am in rare form today!
We had about 6-7 people at the school with us, and, right before totality, some USPS drivers parked their delivery vans and settled in to watch the show. Which makes sense, when you consider what many think is their official motto:
“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
But in actuality, that motto is just chiseled into the gray granite over the entrance to the New York City Post Office on 8th Avenue; it’s not an official motto. It is a quote from Book 8, Paragraph 98, of The Persian Wars by Herodotus. And, I believe, the full translation reads:
“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds, but if there is a total solar eclipse, we are parking our butts down to watch that awesomesauce.”
They just didn’t have the space on the building for the full quote, is all.
The entire event is a marvel of astronomy as it is the result of two massive clumps of rock spinning through the void of space in just the right way so that those standing on the larger massive clump of rock can see the smaller massive clump of rock cover up a burning ball of gas over 93 million miles away.
Total solar eclipses have gotten a bad rap for a long time, it would seem, as many religions considered them to be an ill omen, or to portend misfortune, inconvenience, and spotty internet service. Personally, though, I always found the total solar eclipse to be much more along the lines of a sign of good fortune, as usually when they came up in the media I consumed as a kid it was because some protagonists had traveled back in time but were able to use their extremely convenient knowledge of a total solar eclipse at that exact time and location to convince others that they had the power to blot out the sun, or something.
So, make sure you memorize the time and location of all total solar eclipses throughout history, as, well, you never know when you’ll step through a time portal.
Here’s a little piece of info that not many people know: the sun is, like, really big. Like, really, really big.
So much so that even in the above photo, with the overwhelming majority of the sun blocked, it was still so bright with so much light getting past the moon that unless you were looking at it with solar glasses, you never would have known that an eclipse was happening.
The only part of the eclipse visible to the naked eye, the totality, is such a short time span compared to the wait for it. It’s like being in the standby line for Expedition Everest at Walt Disney World: hours spent waiting for something that is over in less time than a standard television commercial break.
And, like Expedition Everest, I would gladly wait for hours to do it again.
The last slivers of sunlight were finally being shaved away with each passing second. There was a noticeable drop in the temperature. It was getting dark, but in a weirdly compressed way as everything started to look desaturated because of how our eyes work within the rapidly dimming light. You could actually see the shadow creeping up across the sky towards you, and the early formation of what I called “the sunset ring.”
My daughter Gracie was running around yelling “Totality is coming! Totality is coming! Totality is coming!” All she needed was a little sign to carry around saying “The end is upon us!” and she would have been the most adorable little doomsday prophet ever. Much more so than Harold Camping could ever hope.
I didn’t take any pictures until totality, too transfixed by watching the actually slowly shrinking sun be reduced to a smaller and smaller sliver of sunlight, until it finally vanished.
First of all, this is the only good shot I got. I was too excited and nervous and joyous about what was happening. More importantly, despite us having almost 4 minutes of totality, which was near the maximum amount of time, it really does go by a lot faster than you think.
The entire horizon was a sunset; what previously referred to as “the sunset ring.” The sky was dark, like the night, and we could even see Venus in the sky.
But the picture I took doesn’t do justice to the sight. And it can’t. It’s just too big an experience to capture with a camera.
For one thing, what you see in reality isn’t a black hole with a white ring on a black background. Instead, imagine a night sky with a full moon, but take the Rolling Stones advice and paint it black. That’s what you see. A perfect black dot, outlined in white, in the night sky.
We all took several pictures with our cameras and phones and just marveled at it. Fireworks were going off. Dogs were barking.
I also realized, too late, that my camera settings were all wrong for me to try and capture totality with the landscape in the same shot to better reflect what it was that I was seeing. But as I was fussing, I heard people around me suddenly gasp – I looked up, but I had missed the “pop” of the sunlight peeking back around the moon and creating the diamond ring effect. I did see, very briefly, the tail end of it, with a bright shining light past the black circle, but within moments it was already so bright that we needed solar glasses again.
And that was it.
The light was gradually getting brighter, and with our solar glasses on we could clearly see the sun inching back out from behind the moon. There would still be another 30-60 minutes of the eclipse as the moon completely cleared the sun, but within mere seconds, enough light was flooding back in that things were returning to normal.
And after just a few minutes, it was like nothing had ever happened. No portals to another world, no carnivorous plants appearing, …just another partly sunny day in northern Ohio.
It was a little sad, actually. I loved it and definitely am hoping to see it again (even going to another country), but also the fact that such a major event really was over so fast? Still hard to comprehend.
We all headed back to the house, to revel in what we witnessed and compare photos. But, like I said, none of the photos here do justice to the actual event. If you can, go out of your way to see a total eclipse. There’s nothing else like it on this world.
Like, literally.
Glad we both got to see the eclipse. It was an incredible experience seeing 2:30pm suddenly turn to 6:30pm. BTW, please tne know the next tin Cleveland, eh? I'd love to say hi.