Solar Eclipse chasers

I went a 30 miles out of town to see totality get blocked by clouds in 2017, won’t be clogging any rural roads this time

I drove out to rural Nebraska and camped on a rural cattle ranch for the 2017 eclipse. Minimal traffic. Someone local made BBQ and overall I had a really great time.

not looking good for tx

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/03/29/cloud-cover-eclipse-forecast-maps-cities/

My boss is taking his family to Dallas

itll be pretty cloudy that day but tbh i'm less interested in seeing the eclipse itself than i am in just seeing day turn to night and back again.

There was a total eclipse here in Portland back in February 1979. Of course it was a day of thick clouds. I decided to go for a walk down toward the Willamette river as totality approached, so as to have a bit more sky overhead. Given the weather I didn't expect much.

I remember it as gradually growing dim, then dimmer, but the moment of totality was still breathtaking, like when a fast moving cloud shadow passes over you in summer, but magnified by many orders of magnitude. Very memorable despite the clouds!

good luck everyone

Excited for this.

I woke from a brief bad dream about some kind of mass shooting during the eclipse. Never have these, and hoping/assuming it’s not prophetic.

I have wondered what you could get away with in two and a half minutes while everyone's outside.

The library branches were giving away free glasses but ran out, apparently. People gathering at my house for the viewing, guess I better make a pinhole box viewer!

Visiting relatives in Ohio to see it. Experienced one in Nashville some years back and despite it being cloudy, it was just great as others said to experience the day to night to day shift and hear the confused crickets .

I was around for the one in NYC in 2017 and it was pretty cool! People were out walking around on the street. I have some good pics of my pinhole viewer and also how weird shadows looked on the ground. I don't think it got fully dark for that one though.

I wish I planned better - I have a friend who's out by Dallas now and I could've gone to see his family (and driven out with them to see the eclipse in the path of totality). Hell, I could've just gone up to Rochester or Buffalo. Kind of kicking myself because any of those would've been a much easier trip to make than whatever I'd need to do to a catch the next 40+ years of total solar eclipses.

rochester and buffalo are under nearly 100% cloud coverage iiuc. dallas is not great either.

"the path of totality" is such a bitchin' parody of new age twaddle

montreal's all totalitying so everyone's pretty psyched, exchanging various eclipse plans, panic over glasses etc. I'm going to keep it simple and just take it in with a bunch of 8-year-olds, why not?

Sky is mostly clear right now, around 3 I'm going to take a short walk to a nearby park with my kids and we will hopefully still have a clear sky then. I should have 1 minute 4 seconds of totality, looking forward to it.

NASA broadcast here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MJY_ptQW1o

without commentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5j95RUSLd8

I'm using a janky pinhole camera made from a Ritz crackers box.. pretty underwhelming here in California

Took me a second to realize that ambient new age jam was coming from the NASA video in the background.

It started here, btw.

actually the pasta colander works better than the cracker box camera

I got my glasses. I guess I have to remember to go outside and look.

For a minute I thought the NASA cam was playing Tangerine Dream's "Risky Business" score.

I was around for the one in NYC in 2017 and it was pretty cool!

I went out of my office and walked around during that one. I didn't have proper gear so I just tried to glance at it quickly. It still caused a twinge of pain in my eyes, so probably shouldn't have done that. A lot of people were holding up their phone cameras and watching it on the phone screen. Not sure if that's good for the phone but I guess it's safe for your eyes.

Atlas Obscura is hosting a big 3 day festival in Arkansas, I'll bet they're all tripping balls right now

looking pretty neat up there now

so it's not the end of the world after all? god dammit.

to tell the truth, I was just thinking that standing outside with all the neighbors, everybody staring into the sky, is exactly how I imagine our final moments to be before the asteroid hits.

definitely hard to capture, I bet we will get much more impressive images later this summer when the trillions of cicadas hatch.

Yep the biblical plagues are piling up.

Apparently the street lights popped on downtown.

It was pretty cool here in Wisconsin. Beautiful clear day, it felt like I was wearing sunglasses and when I actually looked at it through the proper glasses it was pretty crazy. 10/10 natural phenomenon, especially because I didn't think we'd get much of an effect here.

This was pretty cool! We had glasses and special screens for our phone cameras. We just went outside our house, expecting tons of people would be out in the street - but there was no one. I’ve never seen any kind of eclipse so this was a bucket list event for me.

https://i.imgur.com/pJP9IQc.png

Glad to have had a clear view of it today, was pretty cool.

On an overcast day, it didn't look so different from an imminent rain or snow storm.

God, that was so cool :)

I watched it from Morrisburg, Ontario on the St. Lawrence waterfront, in the path of totality. The full eclipse was incredible. The folks next to us got some amazing photos with visible solar flares.

Besides a dramatic drop in our solar power, it was pretty incredible to feel the temperature drop, too.

Oops I did it again 🤭 #TotalSolarEclipse pic.twitter.com/JXPe26qq3Q

— NASA Moon (@NASAMoon) April 8, 2024

those cheeky astronomers

we saw about 85% or 90% coverage at the holy rapture point around 3:28 PM. just a tiny sliver of sun left. it was cool but i really wanted it to be pitch black and vampires falling on us from the trees.

it was totally clear too. no clouds.

Great view at Chicago O'Hare airport. Big temperature drop.

we sat in the front of the bookstore next door to our house with a few people/neighbors but for most people walking by on the sidewalk it was totally not a thing. we did give glasses to the mailman when he came up with mail.

Total bust here in Boston. They screwed up with that snowstorm forecast earlier this year as well.

This was really cool. Sky was perfectly clear, got gradually darker, saw a couple of stars. A fun couple of minutes spent right on our front lawn.

You know what really impressed me? They outright nailed the timing here, down to the minute.

Total bust here in Boston. They screwed up with that snowstorm forecast earlier this year as well.

ok so here in ne Knoxville the eclipse lacked luster. we were 89% totality here. I guess that 11% matters