I’m sure all of you saw something that impressed you on Monday, April 8, 2024.
Now if you were stuck in traffic after the total solar eclipse, I feel sure you had second thoughts, especially since we had less than optimal viewing conditions because of clouds.
My little family congregated on our back deck in River Mountain. My daughter and son-in-law came down from Austin, and we barbecued hamburgers afterward.
I wasn’t expecting much from the weekend forecast and then the heavy clouds Monday morning. However, it turned out much better than it could have been.
The clouds showed some signs of breaking apart near noon. I set up my little automated solar telescope and we actually had about 30 minutes of partly cloudy skies as the first bite out of the sun took place.
I took several photos through the telescope, one of which is posted here. Then we went through about an hour of very cloudy skies. My solar telescope had lost tracking. It was pointing where it thought the sun’s disc was supposed to be.
Then during the first minute of totality, at about 1:34 p.m., we had a somewhat miraculous partial clearing — the total solar eclipse with the sun’s corona shown though for a very few seconds. There wasn’t time for my telescope to reacquire the image before it hid behind thick clouds again.
Fortunately, my daughter took out her iPhone and snapped the totality photo you see. I later processed it in Adobe Lightroom, cropped it for a larger scale and you see the results. She was our heroine.
Now for all the other important and amazing things just before totality and during.
We were anticipating the eclipse shadow to pass through and knew the direction it would come from. Having said that, there are no words to describe the physical effect of this.
It swept over and stayed there in my neighborhood for 3 minutes, 31 seconds. It got dark, but not as dark as it would have been without the clouds. That was probably the most unreal part of the event.
It also got very quiet, the wind became non-existent, the birds quit chirping. And the most amazing thing: that 3½ minutes went by as if it were only 30 seconds. There literally wasn’t enough time to take everything in. Suddenly it was over!
Now I see why once you’ve seen one of these events, you want to see others, to try to see what you missed the first time.
I am very appreciative of those few seconds of totality before the clouds closed back over. When you consider the world’s population, very few of us have ever seen even a few seconds of totality. And many of us may never get another chance.
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