Eclipse. 2024 april 8. yesterday. Did you see it. your thoughts and observations. I want them. it was fucking cool. hi.
feel free to share pics even though they look much worse than the real thing.
nerd yapping
We headed 2 hours down to a place where we had 2 minutes of totality though I thought it would just be a few seconds. My brother kept delaying us and we had to pick up a relative so we hurried. We went to a house of a relative in the country, with the sun in the clear sky with clouds on the horizon. We got there at the beginning of the horizon, where not much happened. We looked at it through our eclipse glasses, where the moon came from the bottom right, it was really neat. As it kept going, it got darker but not super noticeably at first, even as it was halfway covered (it was really interesting), but I noticed it was getting colder and windier even faster than it got darker.
Near the end though, it was hard to keep my glasses on because I was balancing trying to see the full total eclipse band going blind lmao.
When I knew it was getting near it got super SUPER cold and windy and very dark, especially during the total eclipse. It felt like a movie. It was getting crazy so I looked once but it still seemed the sun was just as bright as it was at first to the naked eye even less than a minute away from the total eclipse, but it looked like ringed, and had these huge rays of light off either side, it was really neat but I couldn’t look yet, so I put on my eclipse glasses. There was only a tiny bit of a sliver yet.
I took them off when people started shouting. For a second, it seemed like the sun but less bright (one of the bits I remember less was this last transition bit cause the hype and panic was crazy), but then I think it was like really starting as I kept kind of watching. The middle was I believe gray-ish but quite dark really with the very light gray corona around it, it didn’t move a ton but it did, like an aura but not just a gradient, you could see different amounts and different places, it looked a bit wispy yet encompassing, and it was a lot bigger than I thought. It really looked like the moon in front of the sun.
It was really dark, you could see Venus to the bottom right pretty far, and the sky was like a darkish blue. The lighting was dark, like almost night, something was off about the colors. It was windy and cold which was really cool and like a said before, kind of like a movie. The horizon had some cool colors though. The eclipse was 2 minutes of totality but it seemed like 30 seconds since I dropped my glasses especially just out of amazing, it was so awesome.
Suddenly, you could see little edges of light on the bottom right, these specks of light, and slowly, it was getting lighter and lighter a little bit as these specks of light expanded into these EXPLOSIONS at a kinda crazy fast rate, and not even like 15 seconds after they started they had eaten the side of the sun, and even during this you could see the corona on the left almost perfectly as it was fading, and then just like that, the sun was enveloped and in a few seconds it looked almost normal again, like it had just about 3 and a half minutes ago. You could look through the glasses and see a sliver of the sun peeking out but of course to the naked eye it just looked like the bright sun. Since the eyes have to adjust that explosion of light was even more impactful than the light fading at the start and also because I was half looking through my glasses at that time and was unsure.
It was crazy how normal everything seemed kinda afterwards though it was still dark and cold-ish for a bit, and some wind. We took pictures and stuff with the eclipse glasses on. I DID snap a photo super quick of the sun/moon during the total eclipse but it didn’t do it justice at all. Like I said, it’s not what it looks like in pictures and even the start and end are amazing.
100% worth it. I don’t know why you wouldn’t use up your day with this and have to wait like, what, 20 years to see the next one.
… i live on the other side of the world