I was going to diary this anyway, because the 2017 eclipse was so memorable for me, and I hadn’t written anything about it, but now that that butterfly story is up, I had to bring today’s count of Diaries About 70-Mile-Wide Things to 2, a record that will probably never be broken.
So it turns out there were a bunch of students at Fort Laramie, Wyoming, just down the road from Guernsey, Wyoming (where my family and I saw the total eclipse) who launched a weather balloon on their own to get shots of the shadow of the moon from an altitude of 100,000 feet! The video somehow only made it onto the web earlier today.
Let’s just get that video up first:
The shadow of the moon has special resonance with me because I had read about it in Astronomy magazine before going to see the eclipse. They said to look west, and you might be able to see the shadow coming at you, but you’d need to see a couple of miles, because it moves at half a mile a SECOND.
We could see a few miles to the west from our vantage point at Guernsey State Park, which I must say is worth a visit even with no eclipse, because of views like that. We were blessed with an absolutely cloudless day, so we would get to see what the shadow looked like as it approached.
I thought it would be a distinct line coming at us, as in the picture at left, so I watched for it as the last traces of sunlight disappeared behind the moon.
But the shadow’s approach wasn’t like that at all, as you might guess from the video.
When the shadow approaches you, it is like a three-dimensional force of darkness. Like it’s originating and growing from a point on the horizon and engulfing everything. My 9-year-old son was actually quite afraid of it as it approached. When it finally does engulf you, it does it fast. It’s still kind of light outside even at 99% coverage, but when that last sliver of the sun disappears, it very suddenly turns much darker, in a way you can easily see. If you were part of a civilization that lived thousands of years ago and did not understand what you were experiencing, a reasonable guess to have made was that this was the end of the world. You don’t grasp that the black circle that was the sun is just the moon, because you never saw the invisible new moon coming at all before it got in front of the sun.
The total eclipse is a very three-dimensional event. Two-dimensional photographs and videos just don’t do it justice. Those black-and-white sun/moon photos you see are a very poor representation, because film does a bad job of capturing the backlit corona. In the same way, photos and even video don’t realistically capture the approach of the moon’s shadow. And you don’t get the awestruck vibes from people all around you in the same way on video.
Going out west to see the eclipse also led us (among other great places) to Florissant, Colorado, where we found 34 million-year-old fossils of plants and insects in shale at a quarry. That wasn’t far off the eclipse in amazingness, but that will have to be the subject of another diary. We really do have an incredible country, and it will survive the mess we’re in now.
If you have any chance to see the 2024 total eclipse, which will sweep the U.S. from Texas to Vermont (by then the home state of President Sanders??), I strongly suggest you go do it. I don’t care how long the drive is (my family’s was NINE HOURS back to Cheyenne, just 80 miles away).
It will be worth it.