OT How did your eclipse go?

Down here in Southern Arizona, it was pretty underwhelming. At the peak, it was only about 40% eclipsed. It got darker yesterday from the cloud cover, than today for the eclipse. It was completely clear today.

I used a #11 welding hood, and it was not dense enough here. I was working in fairly low light all morning, and my eyes felt like I had flashed them while welding. #12 would have been better, #14 probably would have been too much.

BobH

40% is underwhelming, I agree. i

"Ignoramus22488" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com...

60% here. The Solar Shield glasses that may or may not have been #5 under a #10 fixed welding helmet was about right, but the view on NASA TV was better. I have a new 4G LTE hotspot that fed the laptop outdoors.

-jsw

auto-dark helmet set on 13 until it wouldn't stay dark because of the low light levels . Got the old big lens always dark helmet with the #10 out at the peak and it was perfect .

Four things jumped out: Firstly, the crescent shape light source gives odd appearance of the dappled shade under my trees (lots of little crescent-shapes projected onto the ground).

Second, the brush and gravel seemed exceptionally vivid when the eclipse was at 90% or so: the narrower light source made all the little shadows MUCH sharper than one is accustomed to. It just looks... wierd.

Third, the shape of the crescent is NOT the same as the phases of the moon, it is nearly the same curvature of the belly of the sun as of the shadow, but when looking at the moon, you see the terminator nearly straight ( uncurved) at 50% illumination. So, the shape of the crescent is ... odd.

Fourth, the familiar disk of the sun is ... not completely assured. It's a tad disquieting, in a way that only a direct experience can communicate.

p.s. blackberries picked during an eclipse have the power to turn one's tongue black!

Wilson Pickett said it best, "ninety-nine and a half won't do." Was 99.6 here. Went outside and waited and waited and waited. Went back to the TV and learned it was over. Sharp shadows are interesting, but otherwise uneventful.

I measured it with my solar array. The power went to minimum at the exact expected minute of maximum. Since we were far from the dark zone, the intensity was needed to be accurate. I think we were at 70%. Not good but not bad.

We used to have them overseas in the south Pacific both solar and lunar. It was a stark difference back then. Not much illumination on a 500 yard wide island.

Mart> My 16 year old watched eclipse with his science class.

100% for something over a minute in Sun Valley Idaho. The difference between "almost" and 100% is like the difference between smelling pizza and eating pizza, or reading about sex and having sex.

Seeing the total eclipse, taking off the glasses during totality, was simply incredible. Very stark contrast between dark gray sky, super-white corona and black moon. Crickets chirped and it got noticably chilly.

All those tiny gaps between the leaves become "sort-of" pinhole cameras. I saw this during a partial solar eclipse way back in

1975.

I was 100 miles or so out of the totality band, so it was pretty complete here. Smoke from a local fire plus overcast ruined it for watching the amber disc in the sky. I took a couple brief scans of the sun to see the bite small and then halfway. What surprised me is that it didn't really get much darker, even with only a few percent of the sun showing.

Tried a pair of binocs through the 13 auto-shade helmet directed onto a white card, but it didn't work worth a hoot. And a pinhole in a 3x5 card was too small for detail.

The NASA website crashed, as did one Madras Oregon site. What a day. Eclipses are getting old now, though. Trying to watch the morons on the NASA site was downright painful. They'd show 15 seconds of the actual eclipse picture then roar off into some disconnected sidetrack. And Karen whatsherhame's voice and visuals were hard to bear. I couldn't even hack watching 2 hours of them with the noise of the college kids acting juvenile in the background. No wonder science is hard to teach nowadays, given the circus atmo.

Bummer.

- I am a Transfinancial--A rich person born in a poor person's body. Please stop the hate by sending me money to resolve my money identity disorder. --anon

Similar conditions here. I did notice the temperature dropped around 5 degrees during the peak. And like others mentioned how the shadows cast by trees look odd. I've seen the shadows before but still enjoy the sight.

Used my cheapo HF auto darkening helmet for a couple brief looks. Had to wave my hand in front of the sensor to make it darken. Mostly just to see how much of the Sun was being covered. Not ideal but it goes up to shade 13 and my fixed helmet is only 10. It probably would have been fine though with what little bit of time I looked (10-15 seconds) and the hazy sky conditions...

Every time some sort of unique solar viewing activity comes up I wish I had a solar filter for my ETX 90 telescope. It should work well for that kind of stuff. You don't need much magnification for a great view with such a large object :)

I went in to work late, so I could watch it from home. It was quite cool. (Weather was in fact quite HOT in St. Louis.) A good friend came by and set up a pinhole camera and took time-lapse video of it. I had a couple welding hoods, and he brought some, too. The totality was WAY too short to see all I wanted to see, but I did kind of see the corona. Well, one item down off my bucket list. 2 of our kids happened to be available to see it, too.

Jon

I totally missed it! I was in Toronto (~80%) navigating by GPS taking DiL + 10yr old Grandaughter from the "other" London to view a tourtist trap in downtown city centre so my mind wasn't tracking eclipses. Besides, the important one for me was the Annular eclipse of 10 May

1994 it was a dark day in my office because that's the day I retired! After AM coffee break, I took a last box of personal effects to my vehicle and on a spur-of-the-moment brain flash said "why the F**k go back in there." Never did find out if anyone's plans were frustrated and didn't give a S**t.

It was still in the low sixties here at 10:18am, so I didn't feel any drop. The entire month has been eerie with the amber skies due to smoke from not-distant-enough fires, so the eclipse was cheapened here by that.

The week leading up to the eclipse was clear in the mornings, with no haze and no smoke. We got cheated by a week, darnit!

There's no time like now to order the parts to build one. I'd have suggested that last month if you'd mentioned it. ;)

- I am a Transfinancial--A rich person born in a poor person's body. Please stop the hate by sending me money to resolve my money identity disorder. --anon

I am still envious of your 99.6%. I only had about 90%.

It did get considerably darker, like at dusk, right?

Our perception is logarithmic. We can see in a huge band of ambient lighting conditions. I was 300+ miles away. i

Awesome! You had it a lot better than down here...

We rented a motor home and drove to Missouri, stopping at a lake in Oklahoma on the way to and back. Just got home yesterday afternoon. I had a couple pair welding goggles with #14 shades, and a solar filter on my 11" telescope. Captured pictures on both sides, but lost tracking when I yanked the filter off at totality. Grabbed the camera off the scope and stuck on the telephoto.

The corona was very visible, and through the telephoto, I saw a big solar flare. It was pink. The whole thing was fascinating, even though like a chinese fire drill. The next one in 2024 will pass within 100 miles of here. I'll watch if I'm able. And I'll bring a good camera telephoto setup with a right angle view finder for totality. Or if it's any shorter maybe I'll just watch, maybe with binocs.

The photos were good, but the sunspots were not sharp due to high cloud cover we were looking through. Earlier, I had the scope set up for visual observation, and the sun spots were fascinating with apparently black centers and fringes sort of like the iris of an eye. The whole thing's a crap shoot with the weather, but we did ok.

Pete Keillor

Pete Keillor