Eclipse day in the USA is here!

[Gene]

Nashville weather is really good. Probably a few puffy clouds, so luck of the draw if any are in the way. Clear skies this morning on the **easy?** drive in - 95% clear blue. Good start.

The traffic-apocalyse did not happen yet this morning. Amazingly the drive in during "rush hour" was more like a Saturday morning. Do having Nashville schools in session REALLY make rush hour that much worse ? Hard to tell.

If you are trying to observe this beauty of nature, may you have clear skies.

P.S. Tired of hearing blanket statements on the local news that this has not happened since before Columbus came to the Americas. It has not happened in **Nashville** proper since before 1492, but obviously it has and will happen much more frequently than that. Sloppy reporting! :-)

[striegel]

This afternoon I will be on a plane, probably passing through the totality at some point, so I wonder what that will look like. I have a window seat, so at least I'll have a view.

Alan

[Joe Horn]

If you missed the thrill of seeing the sky go dark, the air getting cooler, the world getting quieter, and some stars coming out, as we passed through the shadow cast upon us by the moon, don't worry, an even BIGGER eclipse is scheduled to happen very soon, wherever you are! The sky will go VERY dark, the air will get much cooler, the world will get much quieter, and MANY stars will come out, as we become engulfed by the shadow cast upon us by not just a moon but by a WHOLE PLANET!

Don't miss it! Be sure to step outside of your house, and step into the shadow of Planet Earth! It's the biggest, darkest, coolest, and most frequent eclipse!

Thank you, and Good Night.

[BobVA]

This was the view from Northern Virginia. The clouds rolled in shortly after this, but I was surprised how "twilightly" and cool it got, even being so far from the path of totality.

Bob

[EugeneNine]

My daughters school got to see it. We let me son stay home since his school wasn't going to let them watch it so we had his therapist come in the morning since she didn't have many evening openings. So I only got to see a quick glimpse of it here and there.

[Don Shepherd]

In Louisville Kentucky the bright sunlight of the morning got dimmer and dimmer as the moon covered more of the sun, I think at 96% or thereabouts at max. It was rather surreal. I wouldn't say it was like twilight, it was more like the sun was on a dimmer control.

Hopkinsville Kentucky was in the total darkness zone. I would have liked to have experienced that, but I wasn't willing to fight the projected traffic jams. While traffic was certainly heavy, I don't think it was as bad as they predicted.

I think in seven years I will drive to the totality zone. In the meantime, I am going to buy a telescope like I used to have in college.

[Jeff O.]

(08-22-2017 01:17 PM)Don Shepherd Wrote:  Hopkinsville Kentucky was in the total darkness zone. I would have liked to have experienced that, but I wasn't willing to fight the projected traffic jams. While traffic was certainly heavy, I don't think it was as bad as they predicted.

Well, I don't think it could have been much worse on I-65 north from Tennessee to Louisville. Took nearly 5 hours from the Kentucky/Tennessee border to the rest stop on I-71 just northeast of Louisville. Whose idea was 10 miles of road construction south of Elizabethtown? It was definitely worth it though, the painful traffic memories will fade, but the memory of totality will not.

[EugeneNine]

(08-23-2017 01:17 AM)Jeff O. Wrote:  . Whose idea was 10 miles of road construction south of Elizabethtown?

You've never driven through PA I can see. Wait until you get stuck for hours on the 3rd of July because they needed to repaint the yellow lines on I70.

[Jim Horn]

The Weatherby Rest Area at Interstate 84 mile marker 335 gave a fantastic 2m7s view of the entire show. No traffic problems. Wonderful! Will have to make it in 2024 and 2045 (the latter follows the same course as Mondays shifted slightly south but with 6 minute plus totality). See y'all then!

[Jake Schwartz]

Here's a shot from a bit southeast of Columbia, SC. My family made the 700-mile trip to see the eclipse. With solar prominences at the "2:00", "3:30" and "5:00" positions.

Jake

[Accutron]

We drove about 350 miles to the Cookeville/Sparta TN area. I stayed off the freeways entirely, and traffic on the way down was very light. On the way back, it was bumper-to-bumper for around 20 miles north of Cookeville, with heavy congestion in every town all the way to Somerset KY. We stopped in Somerset for dinner, and didn't have any problems afterward.

Our viewing site was a gravel turnaround along Rt. 136, about 350m north of the centerline between Cookeville and Sparta. Rt. 136 is a two-lane road that runs parallel to Rt. 111, which is a four-lane divided expressway. There were lots of truckers honking their horns at us from 111, and we even had one redneck heckler that declared us "a bunch of stupid f**kers" in a thick TN accent as he drove by. There were a few puffy clouds here and there that gave us some concern, but the sky was completely clear for the main event. I managed to capture sunspots right after C1, and I got some perfect photos of totality. Beyond the eclipse itself, the most striking feature was the complete shutdown of everything else near and during totality. All of the traffic just stopped, and it got completely silent.

The camera I used was a Canon SX530HS, and I used a piece of gold-plated #12 welding glass as a filter during the partial phase.


Viewing location, along Rt. 136 near Sparta TN.


First bite, about 4 minutes after C1.


Viewing location, GPS coordinates. You can see the bite forming in the lower right of the sun's reflection.


Twilight, about a minute before C2.


Totality at 17:30UTC.


C3 diamond ring with blurring from AF failure.

[Don Shepherd]

Wonderful photos, thanks.

[Paul Dale]

Something I've found interesting is that the eclipse in the USA received (a lot) more than ten times the coverage in our media than the last one we had here. An indication as to the source (and bias) of all our news I rather suspect.

Pauli

[d b]

(08-26-2017 11:18 PM)Paul Dale Wrote:  Something I've found interesting is that the eclipse in the USA received (a lot) more than ten times the coverage in our media than the last one we had here. An indication as to the source (and bias) of all our news I rather suspect.

Pauli

Maybe.

What surprised me was the attendance in relation to the annular eclipse 5 years ago. That one, five of us went north from the San Francisco area on an interstate highway for four hours and watched from a forested knoll overlooking lake Shasta right on centerline less than a kl off the freeway. Two local couples joined us at one of the prettiest and easiest places to watch while we drank good beer and the dogs fetched endless sticks. This time there were tent cities, rental RVs, shuttle buses, farmers renting fields over the internet, expensive telescopes, store-bought eyewear, and tourists from as far as Japan AND Oz.
I don't know whether the bump this time was because of the totality, that this was The All American Eclipse, that this could be a shared experience in varying degrees by 300,000,000 people, the internet and news buzz, or some combination.

Like Utah Phillips said; "it's good though". Maybe a few people who hadn't gotten the memo found that science can predict things, with numbers, about our universe. Maybe a couple of them will get out their calculators the next time that a "scientist" on the payroll of Aramco, Shell, BP, Petrobras, or one of the big Ruskie or Chinese ones burp up some methane about greenhouse gases from fossil fuels being harmless.