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I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

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Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

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Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

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You are here: Home / Science & Technology / Late Night Open Thread: Wrapping Up the Day’s Event

Late Night Open Thread: Wrapping Up the Day’s Event

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This post is in: 

Here just north of Boston, 93% of totality turned out to be pretty impressive through the eclipse glasses Spousal Unit had prudently acquired, and the myriad tiny crescents thrown by our old-fashioned metal colander amused him very much. No leaf shadows, because no leaves here just yet… It didn’t get dark, but the light shifted weirdly — the birds started their twilight messaging, and they seemed to be yelling what the actual f*ck?!? at each other. Also, there were a lot of police & ambulance sirens on the main road at the end of the block and the off-ramp behind our house; I don’t know if drivers actually got that confused, or if the authorities just wanted to be sure everyone kept their mind on the road and not the sky.

Eclipse problems I had *not* considered (although, yes, it’s logical)…

Rivka Galchen, in the New Yorker:

… The physicist Frank Close saw a partial eclipse on a bright day in Peterborough, England, in June, 1954, at the age of eight. Close’s science teacher, using cricket and soccer balls to represent the moon and the sun, explained the shadows cast by the moon; Close attributes his life in science to this experience. The teacher also told the class that, forty-five years into the future, there would be a total eclipse visible from England, and Close resolved to see it. That day turned out to be overcast, so the moon-eclipsed sun wasn’t visible—but Close described seeing what felt to him like a vision of the Apocalypse, with a “tsunami of darkness rushing towards me . . . as if a black cloak had been cast over everything” and then the clouds over the sun dispersing briefly when totality was nearly over. Close has since seen six more eclipses and written two books about them, the first a memoir of “chasing” eclipses (“Eclipse: Journeys to the Dark Side of the Moon”) and the second a general explainer (“Eclipses: What Everyone Needs to Know”).

“I’ve tried to describe each of the eclipses I’ve seen, and I do describe them, but it’s not really describable. There’s no natural phenomenon to compare it to,” he told me recently. Describing an eclipse to someone who hasn’t seen one is like trying to describe the Beatles’ “Good Day Sunshine” to someone who has never heard music, he said. “You can describe notes, frequencies of vibration, but we all know that’s missing the whole thing.” Total eclipses are also close to impossible to film in any meaningful way. The light level plummets, which your eye can process in a way that, say, your mobile phone can’t.

In the half hour or so before totality, as the moon makes its progress across the circle of the sun, colors shift to hues of red and brown. ([Annie] Dillard, a magus of describing the indescribable, writes that people looked to her as though they were in “a faded color print of a movie filmed in the Middle Ages”—the faces seemed to be those of people now dead, which made her miss her own century, and the people she knew, and the real light of day.) As more of the sun is covered, its light reaches us less directly. “Much of the light that you will be getting is light that has been scattered by the atmosphere from ten to twenty miles away,” Close said. Thus the color shift…

Each eclipse Close has seen has been distinct. On a boat in the South Seas, the moon appeared more greenish black than black, “because of reflected light from the water,” he said. In the Sahara, the millions of square miles of sand acted as a mirror, so it was less dark, and Close could see earthshine making the formations on the moon’s surface visible. At another eclipse, he found himself focussed on the appearance of the light of the sun as it really is: white. “We think of it as yellow, but of course that’s just atmospheric scattering, the same mechanism that makes the sky appear blue,” he said. When he travelled to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with his family, in 2017, his seven-year-old grandson said, half a minute before totality, that the asphalt road was “moving.” “It was these subtle bands of darker and lighter, moving along at walking pace. The effect it gave to your eye was that you thought the pavement was rippling,” Close said. He had never seen that before…

Reader Interactions

91Comments

  2. 2.

    Ten Bears

    That tracks with the South Shore, and our retirement seacoast cottage on a once and with alarming frequency occasional island. This is my seventh, fifth partial, so I knew what to look for but damn, sitting there staring at the Internet it still snuck up on me. I do take exception with the breathless ‘once in a lifetime!’ line ~ the two totals I’ve seen were from the same spot out on the Oregon High Desert, fifty years apart. The ‘waves of darkness’ was very much my first experience

    Best shoebox viewer ever!

  3. 3.

    SpaceUnit

    Get a grip folks.  I have it on good authority that an eclipse is just the moon passing in front of the sun.

     

    No need to cut out your children’s heart on an alter.

  4. 4.

    Geoduck

    Way out here in the Pacific Northwest, so I missed this one, but I got to witness a partial one many years ago, and yeah, even though it was a cloudy day, I still remember it being eerie.

  5. 5.

    NotMax

    @SpaceUnit

    No need to cut out your children’s heart

    Aw, mom, you never let us have any fun.
    //

  7. 7.

    eclare

    @Geoduck:

    We were at 98%, and it was eerie.  Also like Anne Laurie, I noticed that a lot of sirens began wailing with the approach of the peak.

  8. 8.

    SpaceUnit

    @NotMax:

    Yeah.

    I know I’m just a cynic these days, but the idea of people pilgriming to Stonehenge to stand on their heads and sing The Age of Aquarius during an eclipse just wears my ass out.  Fuck.

  15. 15.

    Brachiator

    There’s what appears to be a reddish triangle poking out from the lower right side of the Sun and Moon in the first photo. This is a solar prominence. From Scientific American.

    A solar prominence is a massive loop of the sun’s plasma that hangs attached to the visible surface of the sun, forming perhaps within a day but lasting as long as several months, according to NASA. They come in a couple of different varieties, most notably eruptive prominences, which are more dynamic structures, and quiescent ones, which can become eruptive when a new prominence forms below them.

    Prominences often appear reddish because their plasma can originate deeper in the sun’s atmosphere, in a layer called the chromosphere, which is characterized by hydrogen at high temperatures that emits red light.

    Some folks also saw Bailey’s Beads.

    The moon does cause a different stunning phenomenon during every total solar eclipse, called Baily’s beads. These are brief flashes of light along the moon’s outline that occur at the very beginning and end of totality and are caused by sunlight sneaking through valleys on the moon’s surface. Baily’s beads aren’t visible during the rest of totality, however, like the prominences were during the April 8 eclipse.

    A relative in Texas was going to skip viewing the eclipse. But she enjoyed the totality so much that she wants to go to Iceland in 2026 to see the next total solar eclipse.

  16. 16.

    Tony Jay

    Events on the scale of an eclipse remind us of how small we are and how finely balanced our perceptions of normality can be, easily tipped into full-on “This is not right and could almost be supernatural, call the priests!” territory.

    A few years back we had a sky full of Saharan sand blow across the UK and I was out and about when a dense concentration of it got between us and the sun. If anyone has ever played the Red Dead Redemption add-on Undead Nightmare where the sky is just the wrong shade of not-blue and the sun has a thin film of sickly green across it, you’ll know the effect.

    It was eerie. A complete transformation of light and atmosphere in just a few strokes of the brush, and for those few minutes I genuinely would have had zero surprise if the people around me had started turning into blood-guzzling monstrosities loyal to abhorrent abominations from beyond mortal ken. It would have seemed very apt and a new normal to fit the eldritch vibe.

  17. 17.

    Gin & Tonic

    Well, my dear wife and I decided to go to – uncharacteristically for April – sunny far northern Vermont. Unfortunately it seems half the population of New England had the same idea, making the drive home agonizing (and explaining my 0400 post.)

    But totality exceeded my wildest expectations. The difference between even 99% and 100% is huge. We had over 3 minutes of totality to gape in wonderment. Now I’m trying to figure out how I can do this again.

  19. 19.

    Central Planning

    We had about 972.3% cloud cover here in Rochester, NY after two days of blue skies. We couldn’t see the sun at all although being in the totality was pretty amazing.

    I’m not sure I can wait until 2044 or 2045 for the next one in the US or another few hundred years for full totality in Rochester.

  20. 20.

    Tony Jay

    @Chris T.:

    There’s definitely a part of our primate sub-brain that sees Big Different and thinks “Weird Afoot. Beware of Monsters”.

    Unfortunately there’s another part of our sub-sub-brain that sees “Weird Afoot. Beware of Monsters” and thinks “Those different to me will be crushed underfoot! all hail the Monsters!”

    Hence, modern conservatism and supremacist of all flavours.

  21. 21.

    MomSense

    Oldest kid finally made it home about 4:00 due to the insane eclipse traffic.  He said it was amazing and he’s really glad he went.

  22. 22.

    Dagaetch

    @Tony Jay: for those few minutes I genuinely would have had zero surprise if the people around me had started turning into blood-guzzling monstrosities loyal to abhorrent abominations from beyond mortal ken.

     
    Well yeah, aren’t some of your neighbors Tories?

  23. 23.

    Nukular Biskits

    No viewing here on MS Gulf Coast.  Thick clouds & occasional showers ruined the day.

    Supposedly MS will be in the path of totality in 2045.  I’ll be 80 years old (hopefully).

  24. 24.

    eclare

    @Nukular Biskits:

    Memphis will be on the edge in 2045, and if I’m still here, I will drive to see it.  Everyone’s reviews of yesterday have convinced me.

    This time I was afraid of traffic on I-40 and I-55, especially on the bridges, and local news reported major traffic jams, so I think I made the right decision.  But it looks like in 2045 I can drive down to Greenwood MS or thereabouts, no bridges.

    Eta>  looks like Tunica will also be in totality, if the casinos are still there, that would be easy peasy.

  25. 25.

    TBone

    Hubby and I and all of our cats napped right through it after seeing the Mazatlan totality on TV.  We didn’t miss anything since the cloud cover was so thick here.  Any time I’m able to nap successfully during the day is a win after all those years of training myself not to fall asleep at my desk in the afternoons. For the first decade of semi-retirement part-time work, I was unable to nap at all.  Full retirement changed that (also, I removed the clock from my bedroom and hung it in the bathroom where it belongs).

  26. 26.

    p.a.

    Here at 90% with high thin cirrus clouds (I guess that’s redundant) the quality of the light seemed “different”, but I’m not sure that isn’t just projection, knowing the cause is “different”.  Here in my urban hellhole daytime animals = birbs, and I couldn’t judge any change in activity because my yard had a hawk visit earlier, just hanging out- I recently filled my bird feeders.  Probably Copper’s, but it did seem to have a small head.  Copper’s are common here, but a Sharp Shinned would be unusual.  But that meant other birds were scarce.

  27. 27.

    TBone

    Today’s events include the UK’s David Cameron visiting Mar-A-Lardass to plead for Ukraine aid.  I can’t even.  There is no excuse for lending legitimacy to that utter fraud, especially in Florida!

    On a previous trip to the US the rightwing congresswoman and staunch Trump ally, Marjorie Taylor Greene, told Cameron to “kiss my ass” and “worry about his own country”.

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/apr/09/david-cameron-donald-trump-meeting-washington-ukraine-support-russia

    I would send a fucking note or, better yet, publish an open letter signed by my entire foreign policy team. Why not both.

  28. 28.

    TBone

    I hope Havana Syndrome sweeps through Mar-A-Lardass like a plague.  Plausible deniability is a bitch.

  29. 29.

    Chief Oshkosh

    @TBone: What role does David Cameron have in current events? I feel a bit behind (as I’ve been assured I’m an ass on occasion, feeling a bit behind is to be expected).

  30. 30.

    Princess

    I’m the crank this morning going around and doing this but: that top photo is AI. The corona is from a real photo but the moon? No way you can see the face of the moon during an eclipse, not even if you’re NASA.

    Tons of fakes on fb this morning on fake sites that claim to represent official agencies. My hunch is that the spread of these may be laying grounds for later election disinfo. But even if I’m wrong about that, I find these photos ugly and disturbing and I wish we could all learn to spot and ignore the most obvious fakes.

  31. 31.

    Taken4Granite

    I made it up to Pittsburg, the northernmost town in New Hampshire, to see the total eclipse. Perfect viewing weather. Somebody at the place I was watching had the perfect album for the occasion: “Dark Side of the Moon”.

    The drive was more than six hours each way. Northbound was entirely in New Hampshire, an impressive feat considering the state’s size. On the way back, both roads going south from Pittsburg were closed, and I had to detour into Vermont, plus it took more than an hour to get through Errol, which is barely more than a crossroads.

    The good: most NH school districts in the path of totality took the day off. The ugly: some people were charging as much as $50 for eclipse parking (I made it to a state park, where the parking was free).

  32. 32.

    sab

    @TBone: David Cameron will never outgrow being David Cameron.

    ETA Also too, how could involving David Cameron lend legitimacy to anyrhing?

  33. 33.

    Ken

    @Princess: There were fake video streams too, as reported by Mashable. The headline captures everything wrong with the internet: “AI-generated Elon Musk videos flood YouTube with fake eclipse streams to promote crypto scams”.

  34. 34.

    Manyakitty

    Our views here just NW of Akron were spectacular. Definitely a little cloud cover (Ohio, duh) but it all disappeared with the eclipse glasses and totality did not disappoint. Our little group enjoyed assorted snacks including my ridiculous eclipse butter cookies (yellow, orange, and red, with black glaze and googly eyes) and sunspot cupcakes (Oreo funfetti with chocolate cream cheese frosting). Oh, and pink pineapple.

    Anyway, we missed you, Uncle Cosmo. Hope you’re on the mend.

  35. 35.

    MagdaInBlack

    Chicago area was about 95%. We all stood around out back of the shop and passed around a pair of eclipse glasses my painter had. We ooo’d and ahh’d and all agreed it was very cool. Then we all went back to work.

  37. 37.

    Anyway

    @sab:

    ETA Also too, how could involving David Cameron lend legitimacy to anyrhing?

    He’s the UK foreign secretary/minister. Kind of his job.

  38. 38.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Princess: Ah, yeah, that picture surprised me and I agree, it’s got to be fake. Its like an artist’s conception drawn by someone who knows scientifically what a solar eclipse is but isn’t depicting what it looks like.

  39. 39.

    Anyway

    I’m officially an eclipse-chaser. Drove 500 miles each way to Ohio (Dayton) to witness totality. Surreal. What G&T said above about the difference between 99% and totality…

  41. 41.

    Matt McIrvin

    I went with my daughter to an event at the Burlington, Vermont airport that we probably spent too much money on, given that it turned out they were closing a whole ring road so people who were winging it could just park along there. But I liked the assurance of having some kind of concrete plan with an offer of parking.

    it was great–the sky in the sunny afternoon suddenly turning twilight-dark with a golden glow around the whole horizon, and the Sun replaced by a pale un-Sun with a dark center. My kid had been looking forward to this ever since the eighth grade when her science teacher “gave them permission” to skip school for it, so we couldn’t not do it. The weather cooperated–there was some high translucent cirrus that kept us from seeing all the stars during totality, but it didn’t ruin the silvery wonder of the solar corona, and Venus was clearly visible.

    And speaking of planes, we were very near the runway, and a small airliner (something like an Embraer E175, American Eagle I think) landed behind us during the period of totality. It must have been a remarkable experience for the people on board.

    Getting there wasn’t that bad–some slowdowns, but we left more than enough extra time. But we paid the price on the return journey, which ended up taking more than 7 hours for a nominally 3-hour trip, since everyone who’d poured into northern Vermont and New Hampshire during the past few days was coming home during the same few hours and poured into the chokepoints of I-89 and I-93. Every major interchange had a 30+ minute backup. The organizers of the event had encouraged us to stick around a bit longer to avoid the worst traffic, but it wouldn’t have mattered–we would have had to stay the night and come back today to avoid the pain.

  42. 42.

    Ken

    As an eclipse survivor….

    (Saw it as a meme, had to share. Though I think they were ripping off whoever started the “As an earthquake survivor….” after last week’s New Jersey quake. Who were probably ripping off someone else.)

  43. 43.

    SFAW

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: ​

    When you see experience totality, you understand why primitive people thought the world was ending.

    I’m in Central MA, and a bunch of us at work would occasionally step out to see the eclipse’s progress.
    I was talking to a 30-something co-worker, asking if he ever read science fiction (since he talks about various sci-fi movies/TV occasionally, and has also written a couple of [I think] sci-fi-adjacent books). He doesn’t read much sci-fi.
    I asked him if he had ever read Nightfall. He hadn’t.
    I asked him if he had heard of Isaac Asimov. He hadn’t.
    He’s a good kid, but JHC.
    [Wikipedia tells me that Asimov wrote it while a grad student.]

  44. 44.

    SFAW

    @Baud: ​
     

    The whole eclipse was fake news. I repented for nothing.

    Hardly — no more earthquakes in the past few days, so your repentance must have had some effect.

  45. 45.

    Matt McIrvin

    @SFAW: I described the plot of “Nightfall” to my kid and she pronounced it stupid. (It’s a story that falls apart if you think about the details for any length of time, which is one of the reasons why it didn’t work well when expanded to novel length by Robert Silverberg and Asimov.)

  46. 46.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    @SFAW: I came to science fiction late, and then it was Bujold’s Warrior’s Apprentice that taught me there was character centered SF books that I could enjoy. I loved Star Trek and Star Wars, but I was slow to transfer that affection to SF books.

  48. 48.

    SFAW

    @Matt McIrvin:

    It’s a story that falls apart if you think about the details for any length of time

    Just like all the fake news/propaganda from the government that the COVID vaccine “saves lives.”

  49. 49.

    TBone

    @Chief Oshkosh:

    Although Conservative politicians have met Trump, as has his great ally Nigel Farage, Monday’s meeting was the first between a senior UK minister and Trump since he left office insisting that the presidential election had been stolen from him.

  52. 52.

    SFAW

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:

    I started reading the Vorkosigan Saga books, based on someone here talking about them (and Bujold). Stopped after the second or third, not for any particular reason, but was glad I “found” them. I expect I’ll need to take them up again.

    However, I’m in the middle of Pandora’s Star, so it might be a decade before I get back to them. [Hamilton reminds me of my HS English teacher’s description of Joseph Conrad: English was not Conrad’s first language, but he developed a great command of the language, and was determined to demonstrate that in his books. In other words, he didn’t know when to stop “talking.” Hamilton spends tens of pages with minutely-detailed descriptions of things like Ozzie Isaac’s hollowed-out asteroid; GMAFB.]

    ETA: Pandora’s Star was another recommendation from the jackals, of course. Some pretty interesting concepts — a ton of them packed into one book — but JHC Pete! Shut up once in awhile!

  54. 54.

    frosty

    @Anyway: I’m not sure if I’m officially an eclipse chaser since I’ve seen two. Both were to places I was planning to go to anyway, the eclipse just picked the time: Mammoth Cave NP and Tennessee in 2017, Cuyahoga Valley NP this year. Now I’m thinking Southern Spain has been on Ms F’s bucket list ,,,

    G&T and the others are absolutely right about the experience. It’s indescribable and totality isn’t anything like a partial.

  55. 55.

    Geminid

    @TBone: Cameron’s office pointed out that it’s not so unusual for a UK official to meet with an opposition candidate, that Cameron had met Mitt Romney back in 2012 when Cameron was PM and Romney was running against Obama.

    But I think it was unusual for a UK Foreign Secretary to be pressing Trump on an urgent national security matter that is before Congress right now. And it was likely counterproductive, because appealing for his support for a project that runs against his political and personal interests only enhances Trump’s sense of importance.

  56. 56.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Manyakitty: Anyway, we missed you, Uncle Cosmo. Hope you’re on the mend.

    Wul I mist yinz 2. Eclipse experience from Bawlmer a bummer – twas mostly clear early in the day but high clouds moved in toward max partiality (~88%). Best friend gave me a Tupac of eclipse glasses Sunday night, so I brought them home & then lost them in the archaeological dig of my domicile. Tried to cobble up a pinhole viewer, no luck, too clumsy. I merely saw the light grow thin in the afternoon.

    Final indignification, I have a lot to mend – both shoulders now making ricekrispies noises after my fall Saturday, right foot still somewhat discolored, left shin swollen – and none of it will mend quickly or completely in my state of chronic decrepitude. I was hoping to head to Yerp next month but it looks increasingly like I’ll hafta cancel that. But over the past few weeks I’ve herd from so many contemporaries who are in worse shape that I should probably just fall asleep (as opposed to, gravity-aggravated contact with unyielding surfaces and obstacles) no-‘counting my blusterings…

    (Cole made a comment t’other day about old age being no fun. I’m old enough to be his pappy, and he has no idea how much funless and diminished and achy it’s gonna get…)

  60. 60.

    SFAW

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: ​
     
    I’m not particularly patient, either, so I’m hoping the payoff is worth it. Of course, maybe I’m just working on what my wife used to call the “patience muscle.” [She used that phrase on the kids when they were little.] But, yeah.

  61. 61.

    Math Guy

    I watched it from a city park in Ellettsville. Indiana. 4+ minutes of totality – it was spectacular, it was sublime. Traffic leaving the area was horrible, and I only made it as far as Peoria last night. Back home to Minnesota today.

  62. 62.

    SFAW

    @Uncle Cosmo:

    (Cole made a comment t’other day about old age being no fun.

    My father used to say “It’s shit to get old.” As I am now an old, I have modified that to “It’s shit to get decrepit.” Which I am not yet — at least not completely — but I’m getting there, unfortunately.

  63. 63.

    TBone

    I’ll be reposting this on a Covid thread but for now, we ARE making strides investigating long COVID:

     Our study aimed to understand inflammatory processes that underlie long COVID and was not designed for biomarker discovery. Our findings suggest that specific inflammatory pathways related to tissue damage are implicated in subtypes of long COVID, which might be targeted in future therapeutic trials.

    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41590-024-01778-0#ref-CR11

    This is FABULOUS news! Explainer with helpful graphics:

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/long-covid-leaves-telltale-traces-in-the-blood-finds-new-study/ar-BB1lhKfA

    Findings from the largest UK study of patients hospitalized with SARS-CoV-2 infection show that long COVID leads to ongoing inflammation which can be detected in the blood.

  66. 66.

    A Man for All Seasonings (formerly Geeno)

    Completely overcast in Rochester. No view at all. It just got dark for 3 minutes.

  67. 67.

    TS

    @Geminid:

    I would expect nothing less from the current UK government – Cameron who held the Brexit vote, then walked away & left the country to Boris when he failed to get a NO vote passed.

    Sunak was all the conservatives could then find when succeeding PMs failed in spectacular fashion and he decided the country needed to reinstate David Cameron.

  68. 68.

    Kristine

    About 92% coverage here in NE Illinois. I sat out on my deck with my eclipse glasses and monitored progress. Amazing how light it is with so much of the sun blocked. Birds quieted but the squirrels just kept on eating—I’d tossed out some nuts and seeds for them and doubt an earthquake would’ve budged them. I’d love to see a total and checked future locations, but I imagine millions of other folks are having the same idea.

  69. 69.

    Ol_Froth

    We saw the eclipse from a winery near Westfield NY.  It was very cloudy when the event started, and we only caught glimpses as the moon started its trek across the face of the sun.  Total cloud cover as totality started, but we went from a typical, grey overcast day to darkness in what seemed an instant.  We were very near Lake Erie, and had a nearly 360 degree panorama.  It was as if we were beneath a dome of darkness, with a dawn like glow surrounding us on the horizon.  The clouds started to break up just as we were exiting totality, so we did get to see the diamond ring.  Views were much better as the moon’s shadow started to slip away from the sun’s disk.  Just an amazing experience, and I’m so glad we were able to see it!

  70. 70.

    Manyakitty

    @Uncle Cosmo: booooo. Sounds like staying home was the right call, anyway. Take the time to get back in shape and plan for the next one.

    Getting old is not for the faint of heart.

  71. 71.

    trnc

    Next total solar eclipse with Arkansas is a mere 21 years away, so maybe the Huckabees should start planning now to avoid the gift to cronies emergency.

  72. 72.

    RevRick

    @SpaceUnit: Don’t go altering my altar! Us churchy types get a bit touchy about that.

    No, seriously, not to downplay anyone’s experience of the transcendent, but for me, I can get it from human creative activity.
    I get goosebumps every time I think about my visit to the Chapel of the Transfiguration in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I was thirteen at the time, it was a simple rectangular church made of logs with rough-hewn, split log pews, and when I sat down, it took my breath away, because behind the altar was a plain glass window, which perfectly framed the Grand Tetons.

    I had similar feelings during my trip to England in 1996, when I stood in front of the foundation of Portsmouth Castle, which was built 1900 years earlier, when I stood inside Salisbury Cathedral, and visited Stonehenge.
    And then there are all the times when great art moves me. Rachmaninov’s Variations on a Theme from Paganini brings me to tears. Or the hymn, “We Would Be Building “ with the haunting melody from Finlandia.

    I’d be curious to hear how others have experienced the transcendent in their lives.

  73. 73.

    Anne Laurie

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: I came to science fiction late, and then it was Bujold’s Warrior’s Apprentice that taught me there was character centered SF books that I could enjoy. I loved Star Trek and Star Wars, but I was slow to transfer that affection to SF books.

    I started swiping my dad’s SF paperbacks when I was 7 or 8, but sf/fantasy fandom was (you probably know this) very much a male-coded genre until Star Trek introduced teenage girls to the final frontier.  And the screaming butt-hurt among ‘real’ (male) sf fans was intense. Which didn’t stop women from building their own ST-centered conventions… with Star Wars (IMO) serving as a bridge between the two warring clans,  a decade later.

    At my first ‘real’ sf convention — Lunacon ’72 or ’73 — my hopeful teenage self & comic-book tshirt was greeted at registration with a major eye-roll and a stage-whispered ‘Ghod, who lets these people in?!?’…

    Some years later, as we all got smarter, one of my new (male) fan-friends looked embarrassed & said, ‘Uh, I think that might’ve been me saying that’…

  74. 74.

    RevRick

    @Uncle Cosmo: I believe it was the philosopher Montesquieu who observed that it’s the diminishments of aging that help prepare us for the ultimate diminishment of death.

  75. 75.

    Miss Bianca

    Meanwhile, up here at the Mountain Hacienda, between slipping back into my normal existence after taking one of our shows on the road, fretting over my brother in the hospital and freaking out over the fact that he had let his insurance lapse (!!??*$@#!), and lots of cloud cover, I was all, “eclipse? What fucking eclipse?”

  77. 77.

    Anyway

    @frosty:

    I made the trip specifically for this so the label applies – not so much for you!  I like the stretch between Frederick MD and Zanesville OH – old-timey mountain towns, nice views , lots of 5-6-7 degree inclines and trucks. I waved to John from a Morgantown Sheetz.

    Before and after that it’s an annoying drive.  Bleah!

  80. 80.

    Bill Arnold

    @Brachiator:

    Baily’s beads aren’t visible during the rest of totality, however, like the prominences were during the April 8 eclipse.

    The prominence was very visible to the naked eye to viewers in north central Vermont (Cabot). It looked like a reddish spot that outshone the whole corona. A point and shoot camera (3x optical zoom, canon) refused to take a good picture; that may be why.
    The people I was with commented about it, and the 1/2 dozen (other) locals that I talked with afterwords all mentioned it too.
    Thanks Betty Cracker for the metal colander tip. The house had three metal colanders; the big one with round holes worked a charm for pinhole camera service..
    Venus was visible shortly before totality (like in the high-90s percent). Jupiter during totality. There were high whispy clouds but they didn’t interfere much.
    Did not notice any stars during totality. The local one was blocked by the moon. :-)

  81. 81.

    Bill Arnold

    @Gin & Tonic:

    Well, my dear wife and I decided to go to – uncharacteristically for April – sunny far northern Vermont. Unfortunately it seems half the population of New England had the same idea, making the drive home agonizing (and explaining my 0400 post.

    Yes, post-eclipse traffic is a thing. Not as bad as from Tennessee east in 2017 (that was like 8 hours of additional driving time), but 91 south in VT was stop and go with post-eclipse traffic, thinning out a bit at 89. I counted at least 8 parked Vermont state trooper cars (green with a yellow strip), no doubt amazed about the good behavior of the post-eclipse drivers.

  82. 82.

    Bill Arnold

    @RevRick:

    I can get it from human creative activity.

    I can also get it by looking at a tiny flower with a high-powered hand lens and simultaneously imagining self as a pollinator insect of small but focused mind.

  84. 84.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Matt McIrvin: ​IMO “Nightfall” is one of the very few competent bits of fiction Ike managed. Most of his stuff is decent concepts wrapped in inedible prose. He writes like a college biochemistry prof – which he was.

    (BTW and just FTR, since so many here dote on ad hominem, he was also one of the most notorious womanizers at SF conventions, claiming he wasn’t a “male chauvinist pig,” as we said in the day, because “he loved all women equally.” [Yeah, bullshit.] I was at the 1981 Disclave where he was Guest of Honor and the female fans (a small %age in thoze daze) learned to stay a bit more than a groping armslength away, if they didn’t know already…)​​​​

    Oh and FYWP for forcing me to continuously re-edit to reinsert the line breaks you delete!

  85. 85.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @A Man for All Seasonings (formerly Geeno): My experience of the “Deutsche Bahn” eclipse in August 1999** from Stuttgart – except it also poured rain. ​Count your blessings.

    ** In Germany it tracked right along the main railway line from Karlsruhe to Stuttgart to Ulm to Augsburg to Munchen and on toward Salzburg. ​

  86. 86.

    Brachiator

    @Uncle Cosmo:

    IMO “Nightfall” is one of the very few competent bits of fiction Ike managed. Most of his stuff is decent concepts wrapped in inedible prose. He writes like a college biochemistry prof – which he was.

    I was really into science fiction when I was a teen, but could not get past Asimov’s terrible writing. Later I read a nonfiction book he wrote about the history of the Bible, which was pretty good.

    Never knew that much about the private lives of most science fiction writers and never attended any SF conventions.

  87. 87.

    Fair Economist

    @Princess: You absolutely can see the moon during an eclipse, by earthshine, just as you can see the shadowed part of the moon during a crescent moon’, ie “old moon in the new moon’s arms”. Not only that, it’s strikingly 3D. I found this the most surprising part when I saw my first eclipse in Oregon in 2017.

    Didn’t see it so much this time, probably due to high hazy clouds.

  88. 88.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Brachiator: I spent less time looking at the eclipse during totality than I could have because I was seeing what I now realize were solar prominences and worrying that I’d somehow timed it wrong and they were Bailey’s beads (which can damage your eyes). It was a classic case of overthinking it.

  89. 89.

    S Cerevisiae

    The difference between totality and even 99% is like the difference between a bag of White Castle sliders and a 6 course gourmet dinner. I have traveled over a thousand miles each in 2017 and this eclipse and it’s been so worth it each time.

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