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Monday, October 16, 2023

Were You In The Path?

Taos Bubbe and I took our low chairs 
to the Mall at the Uof A, along  with hundreds of others,
for an Annular Eclipse Watch Party sponsored by the Flandreau Planetarium.  
There were scientists to answer questions and a long line to look through the fancy Flandreau telescopes.
Most of us took advantage of the $5 glasses with protective lenses.  There were instructions printed inside the left ear piece; one of them cautioned against more than 3 minutes of continuous use.  
I tried putting the glasses over the camera's lens in my phone; it registered a black screen.  So I put on the glasses and held the camera in a spot somewhere in front of my nose and clicked.


These two photos were taken at 8:31am, just as the moon was beginning to block the sun.
At 9:26am, the eclipse was about as complete as it was going to be.
We weren't privy to a full eclipse; ours was about 7/8ths .  It never got very dark, although it did get cooler, with no breeze or cloud cover to account for the subtle change.  

There was a scientist nearby, wearing a lab coat and an official looking badge, and I could have asked him if the temperature really did drop.  But I walked in the other direction, enjoying the mystery, wondering what the ancients thought as the sun began to disappear, and flashing to Bing Crosby using it to his advantage in Paramount Pictures' version of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

It was a lovely morning.

8 comments:

  1. I have always wondered about how such events must have affected people in the beginning.

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    1. Terror? Awe? I envision a lot of praying going on.
      a/b

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  2. We spent the eclipse in the back yard. The light made a dramatic change but I didn't feel any change in temperature. The dogs in the yards around us were barking like crazy but that may have been because we were out there and the cats were all running around, happy to have us in the yard. I photographed the shadows made by the moon covering the sun and Terry made a pinhole camera with which to watch the progression.

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    1. There was a lot of conversation about pinhole cameras and shoe boxes, too.
      a/b

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  3. We saw it from our yard and had the glasses from the eclipse when it went whole for Oregon. This one was good. I'd share the photos we have but not sure I can share photos here. We had a special lens for our camera from before. For the annular, it did darken some and the birds reacted to it as did the leaves on the trees.

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    1. We were so lucky the clouds were in the other parts of the sky! I'm not surprised by the birds, but it never occured to me that the leaves would react, too.
      a/b

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  4. Wow! Those glorious blue skies there. It was too cloudy here to see it, and, honestly, we forgot all about it.

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    1. 355 sunny days a year (pre-Climate-Change). It's a big part of why we moved.
      a/b

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