I thought I had missed it. Forgot what time it would happen, since we woke up to 15 cm snow on the ground and heavy cloud skies. There were seagulls about off and on, usually a sign that it's stormy at sea (inland here). Just a typical wintry day. I thought it was over. There was a blast of hard wind that shook a lot of snow off the trees in a cloud. Then about 5 minutes later suddenly about 5:10 it got really dark. It was really noticeable. I turned on the TV and of course they were in a better location and it was just approaching totality there. 5:17 the official totality.
I stood at the window and looked for animals or birds. Nope. So I watched the trees instead. No reaction from the conifers, which mostly had snow on their branches anyway. But the larches seemed to be wowed. Their bare tips above the crowd. They were kind of bending back spreading towards the event and drinking in the darkness.
Then as it lightened up I was watching the larches and it seemed to me that the big larch was moving its branches and talking to the smaller one to the left. "No big deal, I've lived through weeks of this before (!) and it's going to be fine. You're going to be a big tree and I'm going to help you. It's going to be fine." It made me want to go out and hug my trees.
Yes when objective reality fails you, imagination steps up to the plate. I wonder if I made a video of it, would anyone see what I saw? Maybe... EQ to show where the light is, just after.
I also saw two ravens flying high close together heading east to west after the sky lightened. Hard to tell what bird at that height but the seagulls don't fly together like that. There was at least one seagull flyover as well after.
And that is my eclipse. I did nothing but feed the ravens this morning.
It's a new moon, I hope we all have many wonderful sprouts coming and putting all this behind them.

I was looking at the eclipse pic and wondering why the moon was so round. The answer is, as a bugs bunny cartoon once put it, "grabbity."

https://theconversation.com/ive-always- ... ade%20from.

Labradors wrote: ↑Fri Apr 05, 2024 2:34 pm We are in the path of the eclipse. (Not that we could care). Half a million visitors are supposed to be coming to town to see it!
We hear that the hotels in Niagara Falls are all sold out, and they will be charging $100 for parking. They have pre-emptively been declared a State of Emergency! What a sad world.

What amazes me is the people that get excited about something like this, don't even hardly live outdoors the rest of the time. They're watching stuff on 75" screens at their house, or 6" screens on their phones, not looking at nature or the stars. I know some people like that who were driving up to Erie to see this. 7-8 hour trip. And they don't have the money to, either. Tax dollars at work.

I went all the way to the garden for it...it was okay. I had a welding hood, but saw a schoolteacher neighbor and asked if she had extra glasses. Of course she had a bunch of pairs. It was cloudy, and I didn't search for the exact time of start max finish for here. 1:11 std time I saw the first bit of moon covering the sun in the bottom right corner. By 1:26 it was covering a good little chunk, but heavy clouds rolled in. For a minute or so it showed again while it was nearly full. That might have been around 2pm. Then it was heavy cloud again. I worked in the garden for a bit then came home, it cleared a bit while the moon was just covering about 1/3 of the top of the sun. That was a neat look. Oh, well it's over.

Really, nothing for me to get excited about. I look at the sun so much during April and May while out fishing, clouds on clouds off. If I hadn't known about it from the buzz, and I had just been over at comm garden working, or trout fishing, I doubt I would even have noticed it, with all the clouds. Who looks directly at the sun?

Couldn't get much with my phone, even through the glasses, though I could see it plenty well when the clouds let me.

I was able to see it with the glasses, but we only got 93% interestingly, that remaining less than 10% was so bright it didn’t even get dark. Couldn’t get it with my camera. Anyone know what the green thing in the sky is? It was moving around pretty quick, but I can’t figure out how to post the video from my phone. Wondered if it was some kind of light someone was shining? Odd.



https://share.icloud.com/photos/01dWMw8 ... 8VpIvBjykA

We had a great time looking at the eclipse. I’m glad we got to see the totality. Low Clouds were rolling in the last few minutes before the totality, but miraculously parted for the entire totality. My favorite part was just as the eclipse went total and then at the moment after.

No crazy behavior observed from the animals or birds.

Traffic coming home was nuts. We went off I-10 at Comfort to the back roads and completely by-passed San Antonio. I-10 going east was backed up 50 miles west of San Antonio.

My 90 year old neighbor on one side called me this morning and asked if I had a pair of those glasses, and was going to watch the eclipse. I told her I really had no reason to - I'd seen them before, and one was closer to a complete one than this would be here - 90%, though there was almost a complete cloud cover at almost the exact time (I felt sorry for those who were looking forward to it so much!). She said she wasn't really thinking that much about it, and she'd seen them before, too (probably a couple more than me). I was out (almost) finishing the staining of my deck at the time, and it did get quite dark, but it also got very cloudy - like it has many times lately in this rainy weather, when I had to turn lights on in the kitchen at noon, and I was hoping that wasn't why this was happening. Fortunately, it got bright again, around 3:30, so not that long after the 3:23 time it happened here. I saw my neighbor on the other side out, about that time, and I could see she was hoping to see more.

Traffic was backed up from Austin all the way home to Bastrop.
No idea how much farther down 71 it was backed up.

Another web pic

If anyone missed it... The Gotch

Cole_Robbie wrote: ↑Mon Apr 08, 2024 3:54 pm Pic is from facebook, solar flare makes it look like the sun is drooling.FB_IMG_1712609455894.jpg

Correction, apparently that was a "prominence," and not a flare. Flares are short lived.

https://www.livescience.com/space/the-s ... as-special

The next couple decades of eclipses:

https://www.astronomy.com/observing/see ... -eclipses/

On those oreos, here it started on bottom right and exited about top dead center. So the moon was moving up as the sun was passing it left to right. So 6 ccw to 1 or 12 looks correct, but then 11 on, the cookie should keep moving straight up.

Hope that wasn't a real meterologist that made that...

Somehow the moon did a U turn on the cookie picture.