The Solar Eclipse on April 8th is coming! Are you in the path of totality? Planning on traveling to see it?

[edhunter]

I literally just heard two guys walking by wondering why they can’t see the moon yet. 

Edited April 8 by edhunter

[Chicken hawk]

Im so close to the route, i have my solar glasses, im ready.    I just have to stay awake..i worked last night.  

[liquidcrystalcompass]

I'm in the DFW area and I think we are going to get around 2 minutes of totality. 

[Rhyta]

Only about 60% totality expected here but right now, lots of cloud cover, and the temperature has dropped.  I got to see the partial in 2017 so it's ok if the weather doesn't cooperate.

Update, sun is out so I could see it, with my eclipse glasses.  Looks like a Pac Man took a bite out of it.

Edited April 8 by Rhyta

[edhunter]

It started about 20 mins ago 

[edhunter]

The  nice man about 10 feet away let me take a shot through his telescope 

[Principled Man]

2 hours ago, edhunter said:

 

 

 

That looks like my cousin, SAL....

 

[Mr. Not]

it was very underwhelming here in bay area CA, for this occasion i parked at the very top of a parking garage i was working underneath, but I got back to work within about a couple minutes. i didn't make glasses or observe the sun itself, a lot of people do that and it's kinda lame - IMO what's cool to me is getting to witness the atmosphere go dark for a brief amount of time and then light up again - this leads to golden photographic opportunities.

 

with the 70% illumintation we had here, that didn't really happen at all. 

[edhunter]

It took us just over 3 hours to get to our spot from home. It’s going to take close to 7-1/2 hours to get home. I’ve never seen a backup like this. 
 

Still worth it!

[Union 5-3992]

Driving east to wast in WNY, I've never seen so many out-of-state cars to see a cloudy eclipse. It was still cool even with the clouds through.

 

390 South and 86 were both nightmares apparently.

[Principled Man]

You are my sunshine

(An essay by Alexandra Petri - Humorist, Satirist and Poet from The Washington Post)

 

 

I don’t know if you’re familiar with the sun. Large. Spherical, I am told, though it looks round to me, when I catch a glimpse of it. Gassy. Well, it turns out, it is just a star. It is just a star up there with millions and millions of other stars. From the right angle, the moon can eclipse it entirely.

 

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this happen. I have, and a few million-odd others. Mostly it was a Monday like other Mondays, and then for a little under four minutes in Indianapolis — my spot in the path of totality — the sun disappeared and it was twilight. I was on the motor speedway, in the stands.

 

I spent most of the run-up to the eclipse waiting in a long line to get a sandwich. (This is also what I do at sports games; I find it helps the team. Whenever I get up to get a sandwich and stand in a long line, bang, something important to the team happens. It is my small contribution to the world of athletics.)

 

It’s hard to put into words, the sensation of realizing your favorite star may only be locally famous. In fact, all its fans are geographically confined to a specific region — a specific planet, even. All it takes is the moon in the wrong place and — poof.

 

The first moment it occurs to you that you have gotten attached to something that isn’t available everywhere can make you feel both somewhat provincial and impossibly fond. A surprise: The world is smaller than you thought. There are different ways of ordering a pop or a soda or a Coke, and yours is not the universal one. Now try this with the sun, just one more numbered star in a vast impersonal almanac of stars of equivalent size.

 

When it went away for those four minutes, it looked so impossibly, embarrassingly small. It was like the moment at the airport when you leave home for real, and you glance back at your parents and they are just two people in a crowd of other identically small people, older and smaller than you remembered. Oh, that’s just our neighborhood star. It looked big because it was so close.

 

When my daughter was a baby, we would play peekaboo. Where did you go? When are you coming back? Don’t go too far. I love you. She plays it with me now. She is big enough already to know it’s a game, not to be genuinely surprised by my sudden return. Now she takes her turn hiding, and I wait for her to reveal herself, squealing with laughter.

 

The next time the sun goes away like this, we will both be too old for this game. Right now I am big to her. Big and, I hope, assumed, and visible at 6 a.m. The next time the sun goes away, my scale will be different. It’s one of those gaps of time across which it’s impossible to project yourself except in vows, an imprecise measurement of time at best. There are days when I don’t take any pictures of her because she is so very much everywhere, and then, in a few weeks, that particular child is irretrievable. I sing “You Are My Sunshine” to her, and she gravely corrects me when I sing the wrong lyrics. Right now, I see you, sunshine. I see you all the time.

 

For want of anything better, we began the afternoon’s festivities with the national anthem. Enough of us were gathered together on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway to watch the total solar eclipse that it felt like the kind of gathering whose opening should be formally marked. Lacking any more planetary music, that was all we had on hand to mark it with.

 

You need something to mark this personal, impersonal bigness and smallness. The sensation of seeing your name in the undifferentiated list of a telephone directory, or seeing your town on a globe, or waiting for the face of someone you love to emerge from a crowd and walk across a graduation stage. There are so many suns. That one is ours.  Where did you go? When are you coming back? Don’t go very far. I love you.

 

 

 

 

Edited April 9 by Principled Man

[BastillePark]

Ended up having a great eclipse viewing day. It's so strange watching the dark approaching. It looks like a storm is headed your way and then when it gets to you, it's crazy how dark it gets. One of my pictures. 

 

[edhunter]

12 minutes ago, BastillePark said:

Ended up having a great eclipse viewing day. It's so strange watching the dark approaching. It looks like a storm is headed your way and then when it gets to you, it's crazy how dark it gets. One of my pictures. 

 

I tried and tried messing with the settings on my phone but just couldn’t get that. 

[BastillePark]

22 hours ago, edhunter said:

I tried and tried messing with the settings on my phone but just couldn’t get that. 

That was with an actual camera with a proper filter. I also tried my phone with the lens from the eclipse glasses and got squat.

[Principled Man]

FORT WORTH — For one Ft. Worth family, Monday's excitement was eclipsed by an even bigger event: the birth of their baby.

 

Alicia Alvarez gave birth at 1:04 p.m. at Methodist Mansfield Medical Center to Sol Celeste. She came into the world at 6 pounds, 9 ounces - and nine days early.

 

"I started feeling contractions around 4," Alicia Alvarez said. "I didn't think in my wildest dreams that she would be born during the eclipse."  When Alicia Alvarez's labor pains picked up, their only concern about time was making it to the hospital.

 

"We ran into a lot of traffic because everybody was going to the eclipse, wanted to see the eclipse," she said. "So it took us about an hour and 30 minutes to get here."

 

Sol Celeste, whose name means celestial sun in Spanish, made her appearance just as the sun was disappearing.

 

"I just saw, while she was in the bassinet, that it started turning dark," said Alicia Alvarez.

 

The Alvarezes actually decided they were going to name her Sol months ago. They chose that because they had named her big sister Luna, which means the moon.

"I wanted something that they could share together. So I loved the continuous name of Sun and Moon, and it was just the continuous love," she said.

 

[grep]

My view from before to almost the end.  No totality where I live... But good enough for a couple of times in a lifetime kind of event.

[grep]

 

Before, and peak.

 

[grep]

 

The setup.

[Union 5-3992]

All I got to see in Livingston County, NY. It was still cool to see all the lights flicker on across the valley. And experience it with my parents (who lived a mile from this vantage point). It sucks it was cloudy (my fault for playing Dark Side of the Moon on the way there), but it was still pretty awesome for a quick drive.

 

Edited April 10 by Union 5-3992