Total Solar Eclipse

This might possibly be the coolest thing in nature I've ever experienced. Rob said it so well, so I'll just repeat the words he sent to a few people in email, and then I'll add my own to that.

It was so cool!

From about 2:00 until 2:40, we checked the sun every few minutes with our eclipse glasses.

At 2:40, it was like early dusk, and we felt something was coming.

At 2:41, it felt like past sunset. Another cool thing was that it looked like sunset in every direction, on every horizon. It was so dark that my camera couldn't catch any faces, no matter how close I got to them.

We enjoyed the "ring" by eye only. None of our lesser mortal cameras could capture it.

At about 2:43, the world got brighter, by very minor degrees

By 2:45, the sun was out enough to feel like early morning.

By 2:50, the sun felt like it was back to 100 percent, even though it wasn't.

We kept checking with our eclipse glasses until about 3:30, maybe even 4:00.

It's now after 5 and we're all showered and done for the day. It's hot out there! The City of Columbia calls it "Famously Hot". I call it "too hot".

Feel free to distribute this summary and the amateur photos I've attached. I got them by rigging a cut pair of eclipse glasses to my phone lens. I called it my eclipse monocle.

You have to have special glasses. (Not to view the eclipse when it's completely covered, but to view the sun being eclipsed since even a small partial sun is dangerous to look at directly with your eyes.) We got ours free from the dentist earlier this year. Rob split one that we got extra with someone to use over his phone lens.

He spent a while rigging things up and messing with it, but he got some good shots. Usually, I'm the one messing with photo-related stuff, but I took the kids to play while he got all techy.

Look at his best shots:

When you look through the eclipse glasses, everything is dark (completely!) except for very very bright lights or flashes. When you look towards the sun while wearing them, you see all black except orange where the sun is. If you tried to take them off (even while it's being eclipsed) and look at the sun, it looks the same as any other day - blindingly bright. (Literally blinding - don't look at the sun! You might go blind!) :)

When we first got there, Gideon slept.

We hung out with friends and tried out our glasses, looking at the partial eclipse, and playing on the zipline.

Gideon woke up just in time (of course!). I had wanted to try and get one shot while it was totally eclipsed (because Rob's eclipse monocle did not fit over my very large regular camera lens). But Gideon did not have that same plan.

Can you guess what he wanted to do??

This picture doesn't even show what it really looked like, but it's the best we got. You could see the dark sky with a dark/black circle and around it a narrow glow of light. The sun's corona showed. It was beautiful. (This picture shows the corona bigger than what we saw. And of course, the sun looks tiny because I do not own a telegraphic lens. I'm sure NASA got some awesome shots)

The humidity felt so much lighter, so the kids actually wanted to play outside for the 20 minutes right after the eclipse.

Our friends have a zipline, so we had fun on that. No picture of me, but I tried it too (not the kid version with a seat the girls are trying, but the hang from the handlebars version.) It was awesome!

 The girls pointed out our cupcakes were like an eclipsed sun from the top view. (Not pre-planned like my friend's sun chips and moon pies, but I'll take it!)

Alee wants a tire swing for her birthday. 

(But flat not on its side. I'll have to see what we can do; we cut down our biggest trees.)

Natalie wants to travel in 7 years to one of the states that will get a total solar eclipse in April 2024. I wish it had lasted longer than 2 1/2 minutes; it felt so fast.