Yeah, so there was an eclipse on Sunday

My brother had called me the day before from Californistan, when it was nice and sunny here, and told me to look for it between five and six PM, my time.  As I was driving home with my daughter from a panic shopping trip to Moscow, I noticed the time.  “It’s right now.”  But it was cloudy– full overcast with occasional rain.  As I turned to look toward the sun, sure enough.  There it was!  For whatever reason, I could see it much better with my polarizing glasses than the little Cannon Powershot ever could.  For one thing, the auto focus was somewhat at a loss for doing anything with clouds.  Here are the best two out of about a dozen shots I took from the highway;



 



I guess around southern Oregon/Northern Cali/Nevada way, they had a full annular.  I’ve never seen one of those, but back around 1979/1880, I remember another, even more overcast day that went full dark in the middle of the day.  That was pretty cool.

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5 thoughts on “Yeah, so there was an eclipse on Sunday

  1. That famous full eclipse was back in Feb/Mar of 1979. That was the year I moved to the PNW from Colorado and I remember the townspeople I was stationed in (Prosser) were still talking about how the streetlights all came on. Goldendale, WA had the best telescope to view the eclipse from and for a day it was the center of the Astronomical observational universe.

  2. That eclipse, though, didn’t produce full dark. I was here then too, and it was pretty cool, but it didn’t compare with May 18, 1980, when we had “full dark”, as in black that was unimaginable for most.

    Car headlights penetrated about 2 feet, you literally couldn’t see 5 feet in front of you, and although the streetlights were on, you could stand at their base, and barely see them.

    Eclipses are cool, but only volcanos have created that blacker than black experience in my life!

  3. No photos from me, but both those pictures closely resemble what I saw when I focused Sol’s semi-blocked image through a magnifying glass onto a flat surface. I could clearly see even the few scattered clouds on my tiny inverted image and, since I’m not now blind, my use of a magnifying glass to view the eclipse worked quite nicely overall.

  4. My family and I were watching the eclipse from our front porch. At its peak, it was supposed to be a cresent eclipse–and I have every reason to suppose it was–but we missed it, because clouds got in the way.

    Clouds are a great enemy to the amateur astronomer. I’d imagine that not many professional astronomers like clouds, either…

  5. We had an eclipse in my hometown when I was in 8th grade (around 1994). There was much talk in my school district about how to use this event as a learning opportunity. The final decision was to direct all teachers to close the blinds and keep the students away from the windows, lest any children, in their curiosity, were to blind themselves. It was the safest and most cost effective solution.

    I learned a lot that day; but about bureaucracy rather than astronomy.

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