Solar Eclipse chasers

So, then, everything's just fine for the nonce.

my house is in 99.6% coverage area. path of totality is 15 miles north. but that 15 miles could take a couiple hours to travel thx to traffic.

def the "once in a lifetime" opportunity appeals to me, and everything you read says "if you can get to totality, you MUST!" but i'm also wondering if i should avoid the stress and just enjoy 99.6% from the roof of my house.

thoughts, ilx?

i vote totality.

99.6%, but I'm not that excited by the whole thing anyway.

If you could do the 15 miles by bike I'd say totality. Wrap up a picnic basket and find a quiet spot if possible.

If not: 99,6%. You won't even notice the difference, really. I went to France with some buddies to see one, 15 years ago or so. We made a camping trip out of it which turned out to be memorable, one for the ages. And worth way more than the eclipse itself. We found a spot by a small lake. Went there an hour early - it was in the afternoon - and it was p magical to see all the birds and swans in the lake going to sleep again, thinking it was night. Then after an hour waking up again as if nothing happened, as if it's completely normal to sometimes have an extra 'night' during the day.

If anything, the effect of a solar eclipse is best seen in nature, in animals. So I'd advise a spot like that. It doubles your value and is much preferred to standing in a loud crowd going ooh and ahhh with their spex on.

and taking photos with a flash...

I love you but I've chosen totality.

I also saw the France one (18 years ago, if we're being precise) - instead of driving to Cornwall like everyone else (idiots!) we got Le Shuttle and watched it from a field just outside Amiens. A+ would gawp again etc

Ha, we were near Amiens! 18 years ago already, sheesh.

this eclipse glasses shortage business is totally bogus tho fwiw

Finally, all those oversized Amazon boxes reveal a purpose

http://i.imgur.com/UYuFldx.jpg

huge recall of glasses that a coffee chain was giving out, this will end well

Have ye ever tried blinking, but for longer.

Also holy shit @ sleeves overheard quotes. Poll that shit.

I got a refund and a "we can't guarantee these" for the glasses I got, but I looked at the uneclipsed sun with them for a few seconds at a time the other day and I think they'll be ok for my purposes -- just a few seconds every few minutes.

from a friend - "It turns out there are all types of fake eclipse viewing glasses. My mother the scientist called me yesterday to give me the tip of how to test whether you have safe eclipse glasses. Put on your glasses and look directly at a bare light bulb. If you can see the light bulb filament, they're no good, if you see darkness, you are good to view the sun. Keep your eyes safe!"

my house is in 99.6% coverage area. path of totality is 15 miles north. but that 15 miles could take a couiple hours to travel thx to traffic.

def the "once in a lifetime" opportunity appeals to me, and everything you read says "if you can get to totality, you MUST!" but i'm also wondering if i should avoid the stress and just enjoy 99.6% from the roof of my house.

thoughts, ilx?

― alpine static, Monday, August 21, 2017 3:10 AM (seven hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

can't beat the roof of your house imo

i have to work today but at least the astronomy department is hosting the eclipse party right outside the library where i work

we're a few hours from totality, i think we will have 80% here

I think I have one incandescent bulb left in the house.

"Nitrous Oxide while we climax and experience totality and conception, is OK with me."

the new Adam Ant single

http://i.imgur.com/cvTCQib.jpg

NASA Raw feeds https://www.nasa.gov/eclipselive/#NASA+TV+-+Eclipse+Views+(Raw+Feed)

i'm about to experience this the best possible way (i.e. w/ 30 excitable teenagers who don't know a whole lot about how the sky works)

Dying at sleeve's overheard quotes

Most popular guy at Homestead National Monument? Has to be @BillNye. He stopped by our NET table, but has been on the move! #Eclipse2017 pic.twitter.com/3kkt6KYO6X

— Dennis Kellogg (@Dennis_Kellogg) August 21, 2017

not in path of totality, don't care

we'll add that to not_good_enough.xls

92% or whatever in Seattle was reasonably cool, v satisfied with my eclipse, glad I didn't try to haul myself down to Salem

NASA feed couldn't even stay on the eclipse for the whole totality, kept breaking away to show us some random website. And went back to the presenters just as the sun was reappearing through the mountains. Pah.

92% here. Cloudless and dusky at 1:20.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFVTWEVhxY8

I have decided that the funniest part of Trump going blind would be that he would NEVER admit that he went blind

— slackbot (@pareene) August 21, 2017

Here just south of Portland, we reached a maximum of about 99.5% occlusion, so we missed seeing the corona and having stars visible, as you get with totality. Still, it very cool. At the moment of max it was about as dusky as fifteen or twenty minutes after sunset, but only briefly. When the light came back, it seemed to do so very rapidly, because my brain had slowly adjusted to the light diminishing and was surprised by the sudden reversal.

Best observation of the day: the dappled sunshine that filtered through the trees and shone on the ground was all crescent-shaped as the moon occluded the sun, and when the moon had passed its max and began to move off, the crescent-shapes flipped over. Kind of like having a natural pin-hole viewer. Cool!

That's the bit I remember from the UK partial eclipse in 96, walking to the dentist with crescent shaped dapples.

it is incredible to me how bright the sun is, even at a distance of 93 million miles, even when it is more than 60% occluded as it was here

also keeping in mind that we only get about 0.00000005% of the sun's radiation

crescent shadow photo

here to report eclipses are really cool. it made a bunch of tiny half-moons (well ~actually~ half-suns) appear in this tree shadow! v neat pic.twitter.com/r2byoU4iaX

— Haley Byrd (@byrdinator) August 21, 2017

somewhat underwhelming in the northern climes :(

"When is this gonna start?"
"I think that was it"
"I guess it's brighter now.."

i looked right at it

it was nice talking with you all

my house is in 99.6% coverage area. path of totality is 15 miles north. but that 15 miles could take a couiple hours to travel thx to traffic.

def the "once in a lifetime" opportunity appeals to me, and everything you read says "if you can get to totality, you MUST!" but i'm also wondering if i should avoid the stress and just enjoy 99.6% from the roof of my house.

thoughts, ilx?

― alpine static, Monday, 21 August 2017 07:10

well, we decided at the last second to go. hit no traffic (took a very rural route through Oregon), watched the whole thing and it was truly awesome. temperature dropped, it totally got dark, saw stars and holy shit ... the sun was weird lookin'!

Nuclear fusion in the sky!

whoa so jelly

We had a local contingent of School of Rock playing at our community gathering. They played not a single sun or moon related song. They ended with a Soundgarden song ... that was not Black Hole Sun. We just assumed they were trolling everyone.

I think we got like 80% here in Sacramento
we went out for a walk around 10am and saw all the crescent shadows
a lady in our building gave some of us some spare glasses so I got to see the dope cheese crescent in the sky

and then I kept going to the office window to look more as it got fatter

it was neat :D

Yeah the cool part (unless you were in the path of the totality of course, we were at like 65% here) is all the scalloped shadows when you're walking through trees and the momentary dip in temperature despite no breezes or approaching storm. A few moments on some other Earthlike world.

scalloped shadows sound delicious

an uncanny feast for the senses

All the news clips I've seen about the eclipse now contain crowds screaming and cheering and oh-my-god'ing. It's so odd, when I saw the France one you could hear a pin drop.

i told my coworker I had a weird memory of seeing the crescent shadows before

but the last eclipse visible near where I grew up was in October 1976 - 6 months after I was born O_O