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| Watching the eclipse |
ANDI:
It started around 9:00. It moved so slowly that I weaved for a while and glanced up every now and then. At first it looked like somebody took a bite out of the sun. Then it started to look like a crescent and it started to get colder. Then it looked like a diamond ring. Then it was the total eclipse. It was so dark that the hawks came out to hunt. Then a little while later it was doing the process over.
NICK:
It started out at about nine in the
morning. In the beginning the moon only covered a tiny bit of the sun. With the
solar glasses you could stare right at the sun. It was kind of red. You could
also see the moon as it covered the sun. It was really cool. As the eclipse was
going on it was getting colder and darker. My favorite state that wasn’t
totality was the diamond ring stage. The diamond ring stage was where one tiny
dot of sun was showing and it looked like the diamond on a ring. Next was the
totality. It was so cool. I don’t really know how to describe it but the corona
around the moon was a light blue color and the rays jutted out and then looped
back to the moon and repeated that pattern on the inside of the loop. The
totality lasted about two minutes and it was not what I expected. During
totality it was so dark that nocturnal animals came out like hawks.
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| This is a stock picture from the internet - our camera wouldn't capture the actual beauty. This is the closest approximation we could find to what we saw. It was a bit more blue for us. |
Very cool! We took turns watching back here in WI thru one of our MIG welding masks at work. I brought my oxy/acetylene welding goggles from home, but it was immmeditaely clear when I looked up that they weren't dark enough. (Ouch! But I'm fine.) We didn't get totality here, and most disappointingly we were completely cloud covered several minutes before and after the closest coverage. Still, it was surprising how dark it got--enough for crickets to start chirping. That, and how work just shut down for an hour while everyone came out to watch the sky. Pretty much everyone in our building was in the parking lot! Wish I could have ridden the motorcycle down to Tennessee to see totality, but we were right in the middle of testing our new Army truck. Couldn't pick a worse time to get away!
ReplyDeleteIt was really fun! During totality it was really dark. By us hawks came out. We watched through special eclipse glasses.
ReplyDeleteWe miss and love you guys,
Nick