lydamorehouse | (Reply)

From:

We drove up to Corvallis, abut 40 miles up US 99. Denise didn't want to bother: It'll be nearly total here, and besides, I can see it on television. Plus, morning after an art fair, still tired...

I insisted. I've wanted to see a total eclipse since my first partial in La Crosse in 1979.

Oh. My. God. It was amazing. Seems to take forever, at first, a few bites more everytime you look. Then the light gets weird, dim, like dusk, but not the golden color of late afternoon, still daylight white. The last moments you can see the tiny crescent sun get smaller and smaller and then... it's gone, and you take off the glasses and there's this silver halo around a charcoal grey disk, the sky is dark but not like quite like night, Venus comes out (though no stars), streetlights pop on, but the horizon all around is still light. Then, after way too short a timeless time, suddenly there's the flash of light at one o'clock, the diamond ring thing they tell you about and you pop on the Eclipse glasses again and it's a crescent, but it looked like a perfect dazzling Starburst for just a moment. And it's suddenly daylight again and as you walk to the car, you notice that all the leaf shadows under the trees frame swarms of perfect crescents.

You really need to be in Indiana in 2024.