Today was my third eclipse. At least the third that I can recall. My first was in elementary school, when they took great pains to coach us into not looking up. We made the little cardboard pinhole thing and it was underwhelming. (It was only a partial eclipse where we were.) Then, in middle school, I was working one summer for a teacher and we were outdoors and watched another partial eclipse. It was underwhelming.
But this time, so much more of the sun would be eclipsed! A vast, vast majority of the sun where we are! And the hype machine had, of course, reached Mayweather-McGregor proportions. I’d said I wouldn’t bother, but if you hear the drumbeat long enough you’re liable to start dancing. So I got my gear and got ready:
Today was also the first day of classes for the fall term and everyone wisely avoided making ominous omens out of the two parallel events. But we put the eclipse up on the big screen for any curious folks who wanted to save their eyes and enjoy some really top-notch air conditioning:
And when I was walking into the building from elsewhere a student let me borrow his little eclipse card the school was distributing to several thousand people:
If anything, that’s just a terrific demonstration of the “size of the sun” in the sky. That’s in partial eclipse, but look how tiny it is, compared to what you normally think of as the sun’s size, which is really just pure radiation beaming down onto our heads and into our eyes — with which we are, I am told, never to use for solar contact.
Also, I made a video. This is 360 degrees, as I am still playing around with the camera to see what it will and won’t do. (Audio is a consideration, I realized this time out.) So move it around and see a few things:
I would have started the video a bit earlier, and caught more of the eclipse, but I encountered the two most clueless people I’ve met in some time. They whelmed me, but not overly so.
