There Goes the Sun

When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, The moon and the stars, which You have ordained, what is man that You are mindful of him, the son of man, that you care for him?  (Psalm 8:3-4)

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We're back.  Jenn and I spent Sunday and Monday on a quick, but intense pilgrimage to the Zone of Totality - in our case, Princeton, KY - to view the Great American Eclipse.  And what a great time. . .

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We left OurTown around noon on Sunday, and drove down to Evansville, IN, where we stayed with old friends. How many of you remember FTN?  He and his wife (she was Autumn in his blog, back in the day) and their two teenage children were our hosts, and took wonderful care of us Sunday evening and Monday morning.  We had been concerned about the traffic we would encounter, but honestly, traffic on the way down was pretty much a  non-issue for us (aside from the fact that the State of Indiana had about ten separate construction zones on I-69 between Michigan and Kentucky; I am not exaggerating).

We got up early on Monday, and headed across the Ohio River and into Kentucky.  Our initial plan had been to go to Hopkinsville, but at the last minute, we decided to go to Princeton (about 20 miles west) instead, looking for a smaller, more low-key setting.  As it turns out, we're glad we did (more on that to follow).  We got to Princeton (a town of about 6000 souls), around 8:30 AM, and found a group of folks settling into a parking lot that wasn't yet full, between the courthouse and the police station.  So we pulled in and joined them.  We all reasoned that, if the local authorities didn't want us there, well, we were right where they could see us, and they could tell us where they'd rather have us.

I can't say enough about the hospitality of the good folks of Princeton, KY.  They were invariably friendly to us, and eager to see to it that our stay with them, however brief, was a pleasant one.  The offices in the courthouse were closed (figuring that nobody would really want to be at work during the eclipse, I suppose), but there were a few gracious folks who showed up to keep the courthouse doors open, so we visitors could use the public restrooms in the courthouse.  We had arrived in Princeton more than three hours before the beginning of the eclipse, and five hours before the totality, so we spent our morning walking around, seeing the sights of the lovely little town, with its late-19th century buildings, and a beautiful cave, out of which issued an underground stream.  A few small shops were open, selling antiques, t-shirts, and whatnot, and there was a little artisan bakery selling some really spectacular cupcakes.

Our main concern had been the weather.  The forecasts for western Kentucky had been, um, unstable and somewhat ambiguous in the days leading up to the weekend.  But the closer we got to our go/no-go decision point, the trends were mostly promising.  When we got to Princeton, the weather was hot.  REALLY hot.  Probably around 95F, with humidity to match.  And most importantly, the sky was clear.  There was a thin layer of high haze in the morning, but as the day wore on, it virtually disappeared.  There were some clouds off to our west, but it became apparent that the prevailing breezes aloft were southerly; such clouds as there were bypassed us, and the skies over Princeton were beautifully clear all day.

With the heat and bright morning sun, a large part of our morning free time was spent in a search for shade.  There was a gap between a couple of the buildings on the main street, in which had been built a sort-of stairway park down to the cave and stream.  Jenn and I ended up settling there for a half-hour or so, chatting with a few other folks who were enjoying the shade as much as we were.

Folks continued to trickle into Princeton all through the morning (I'd guess a few hundred altogether, by the time the totality hit), even after the eclipse had begun, and us early-birds were already peering through our glasses at the gradually-diminishing crescent sun.  Some had come from Hopkinsville, up the road, with tales of being charged $50 to park (one enterprising Hopkinsvillian was charging folks $100 to sleep in their cars on his property), and by mid-morning Monday, the Hopkinsville authorities were refusing anyone new from setting up camp in their town, and so some of them were making their way to Princeton.

The little group of eclipse-chasers in our parking lot (about 20 carloads; maybe 40-50 folks in all) came from a variety of directions - several of us from Michigan (we spoke with people from Grand Rapids and the Detroit suburbs), Ohio (we had folks from Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Dayton) and Indiana, as well as a group from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and one gentleman who was there with his teenaged son from the UK (they had planned a two-week tour of the US, with the eclipse as the centerpiece).

We had a couple of friends from OurTown who were on similar pilgrimages to ours - one on the bluffs above the Missisippi river in southern Illinois, and another in a park in northwest Missouri (I have no idea why they chose those locations; we chose Princeton because it was about the shortest travel distance for us).  Through the morning, we were trading texts with each other, describing our respective travels, and our viewing locations.

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The eclipse itself began at 11:55 AM, at which point we could just see a little wrinkle of less-than-perfect roundness in one quadrant of the sun's disk.  For the next hour or so, we wandered around from one car-group to the next, talking about our past eclipsian experiences, the sundry travel experiences that had brought us to Princeton that morning, or just talking about the weather or our families, in between pausing every few minutes to take another look at the steadily shrinking solar crescent.  Jenn and I were parked next to Pete and Marie from Cincinnati, a couple about our age with six children, and their youngest in high school, so we had some common ground to talk about.

By about an hour into the eclipse, the moon was covering about 70-80% of the sun's disk, and it was noticeable that the ambient light was significantly dimmer than normal.  Not long after that, we began to notice that the temperature, which had begun the day at an oppressive level, was positively comfortable.  With five minutes to go until totality, the sun was a thin sliver in the sky, and the ambient light was like the dusk just after sunset.

As it got closer and closer to the moment of totality, we could almost see the thin sliver of sunlight visibly shrinking, until, at the last instant, we saw the brilliant 'diamond ring' as the sun's corona became visible, and the last sparkle of sunlight made a bright flare, looking just like a diamond on a ring.  And then, an instant later, the sun went out.

(I didn't take this, but it was taken yesterday, and is basically what we saw)

Annie Dillard, in a wonderful essay in the Atlantic, about the 1979 eclipse in Yakima, Washington, wrote about an onrushing wall of shadow as the eclipse overtook her.  We didn't see anything like that.  For us, the last moments of sunlight were like someone wringing the last bits of light out of the air.  One moment, we were standing there, seeing each other's faces, and an instant later, it was dark.

A joyful shout went up all through the town for maybe ten seconds or so, and then it became quiet for the rest of the totality, as we all strained to absorb the entire experience.  The sky became deep blue, not quite black.  The street lights came on, but were not in the least an impediment to viewing the eclipse.  Venus shone brightly to the west of the sun.  I took a quick scan of the sky to see if any other stars were visible, but Venus was the only one we saw (we consulted an online star chart on our way home, and it indicated that a few others should have been visible; but from the chart, it seems they may have been hidden from our view by the courthouse).

And dominating the sky, directly above the courthouse, like something out of Back to the Future, was the black circle of the moon blotting out the sun, with the thin white ring of the solar corona surrounding it.  It's a little embarrassing, but to be perfectly, brutally candid, I've seen enough 'simulated' eclipse videos in my life, that it was a little hard at first to grasp that the celestial wonder I was witnessing was actually real.  But it was. Oh, yes; it was definitely real.

Two minutes and forty seconds after the sun disappeared, suddenly we had another brilliant 'diamond ring' flash, and then the sequence of the last seconds before totality was reprised, in reverse.  The group gave another round of applause to the sun, the dusky light returned, and it began to get warmer again.  We spent a few minutes watching the crescent sun growing back, as the moon slowly moved on, uncovering the sun and allowing it to shine once again.  Our little parking-lot community circulated around, shaking hands and thanking each other for sharing the experience, wishing each other a safe trip home.  And within a remarkably short time, folks had packed their cars back up, and the community of eclipse-watchers morphed into a line of cars heading out of town, back toward the freeway, and back, in a hundred directions, to their homes.

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Our trip home was a good deal more, uh, gruelling than our trip down had been.  On the inbound journey, we were all coming at different times, and stopping at different places along the way.  But we were all leaving at basically the same time.  And, for those of us headed north across the Ohio River, there are only a limited number of bridges by which to cross the river, and they're mostly in cities.  It took us an hour to travel the last five miles to the bridge back into Evansville (and there was even construction on the bridge itself).  So we arrived home almost two hours later than we'd planned.

But we had seen the total eclipse; we had seen the moon blot out the sun, and darkness at mid-day.  We had seen the spectacular black orb, and the diamond ring; all of it.  The wonder of God's creation.  Awesome, magnificent, once-in-a-lifetime; it took our breath away. . .

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There will be another total eclipse in the US in 2024, and even closer to us, passing through Indianapolis, Cleveland and Buffalo.  It should only take us 2-3 hours to drive into the Path of Totality for that one.  But you know, it's not guaranteed that I'll still be here in seven years (I hope and  even expect to be, but it is not guaranteed), and if I am, it's not guaranteed that the weather will co-operate then, either.  So, I am glad to have seen this one. Totally, totally worth it (you see what I did there. . .)

Thanks again to our wonderfully gracious hosts in Princeton, KY.  You all went above and beyond the call of duty, and I am grateful. . .

Another Eclipse Post. . .

As we draw closer to The Great American Eclipse of 2017, a few thoughts are percolating in my brain (which is not quite as painful as it sounds). . .

Of course, a solar eclipse happens when the moon passes between the earth and the sun, and what's so complicated about that?  But when I think about it. . . It is at least a colossal conincidence (or is it?) that the moon and the sun are almost exactly the same size, when viewed from here on earth.  The moon is about a quarter the diameter of the earth, and the sun is about 100 times bigger than Earth.  But the sun is about 400 times farther from the earth than the moon, so they look to be about the same apparent size.  If the moon were a little bit smaller, or a little farther from earth, it would never be able to cover the sun (and all eclipses would be like the one in '94 that passed near OurTown).

Eclipses always correspond with a New Moon - when the moon passes from one side of the sun (viewed from our persepctive here on earth) to the other.  In fact, if the moon's orbit were coplanar with the earth's (i.e. perfectly 'flat' to earth's orbit), every new moon would result in an eclipse.  But because the moon's orbit is tilted by 6 degrees relative to the earth's, the moon sometimes passes above the sun, sometimes below it.  If the earth were bigger (I don't really know how much bigger would be 'big enough'), then the likelihood of the moon's shadow crossing the earth would increase, and there would be more eclipses.  As it is, total eclipses occur roughly every 1-2 years, somwhere on the planet (and the fact that it's been almost 100 years for the US means we're WAY overdue) (but, to make up for it, the next one comes less than seven years from now, in April 2024). . .

So, an eclipse happens when a new moon corresponds to the moon being at a point where its orbit is crossing the earth's orbit (or at least, 'close enough' to it).  And where the eclipse falls on the surface of the earth just depends on which part of the earth is turned toward the sun at the moment.  Next week just happens to be when our turn comes up here in the good ol' USA, for the first time in virtually a century.

It blows my mind a little bit that things like eclipses are mathematically predictable, to a high degree of precision.  I mean, we know when the eclipse is going to happen and where it's going to happen.  There are published maps, showing the path of totality, and how wide it is, and which towns are in the path of totality, and which are just outside it.  If you're on the southwest side of St. Louis, you'll see the totality; if you're on the northeast side, you'll just miss it, and we know that before it even happens.  We know how the eclipse will progress across the country, starting in Oregon around 10:15 AM Pacific Time, and ending in South Carolina about an hour-and-a-half later, mid-afternoon Eastern Time.  We know that the totality will last for just longer than two minutes (two minutes and 40+ seconds in Missouri/Illinois/Kentucky, where Jenn and I will (hopefully) be).  I mean, that's knowing an awful lot about how it's all going to happen, and it was known years, even decades ago. . .

Jenn and I are laying our plans to drive down next Sunday afternoon/evening.  We'll actually be staying with an old blogger-friend who lives not too far from the path of totality (but not actually inside it), then getting up early on Monday to fight the (hopefully not TOO awful) traffic, and settle in a decently favorable location from which to track the progress.  The long-range forecast, at least as of today, is pretty favorable for good viewing.  Hopefully, it will stay that way.  Then, sometime around 1:30 or so, the lights will go out.  And that's what I'm waiting to see. . .

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And of course, there are those who are just unclear on the concept. . .

In the meantime, I'm trying not to get too irritated with Jenn singing that old Bonnie Tyler song, over and over and over and over. . .

Signs In the Sky

By now, most of you, or at least some of you (okay, the nerds among you) have heard about the total solar eclipse that is due to happen on August 21, two weeks from today.  This is the first total eclipse visible in the continental United States since June of 1918, nearly a century ago.  So it's a pretty big deal, as eclipses go.  Over a narrow band maybe 50 miles wide, stretching from the Oregon coast to South Carolina, the moon will blot out the sun, for as much as two-and-a-half minutes, stretched over a couple hours, from coast to coast.

Jenn and I are planning to drive down to Hopkinsville, KY (about 8-9 hours drive time from OurTown), braving what will probably be pretty brutal traffic, at least by Hopkinsville standards.  Depending on what we see in the weather reports the day before, we could end up anywhere from Illinois to Tennessee, or just stay home, if we see that the eclipse path will be clouded under.  But we are looking forward hopefully to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the sun blotted out in mid-day.  I'll certainly blog about it, once we get back. . .

But until then, I'll whet your appetite with a few reminiscences of heavenly phenomena I've been witness to in the course of my young life. . .

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The earliest solar eclipse I can remember happened in July of 1963, when I was seven years old.  Our family was vacationing at a beach resort near what would soon become our hometown UpNorth.  In retrospect, my dad was probably interviewing for the job that would have us moving there the following November (just after the Kennedy assassination), and his bosses wanted to impress upon him the pleasantness of life on the Big Lake, in the midst of the North Woods.

Anyway, seven-year-old me was mostly happy to splash around in the Big Lake, among the sandbars and whitecaps; I recall it being sunny and warm for our entire stay there.  Then one day, folks gathered on the beach, with an air of excitement, talking about 'the Eclipse'.  Precocious (read: nerdy) child that I was, I had read age-appropriate astronomy books (maybe even a year or two above my grade-level), and knew what an eclipse was (at least in theory), but I had never seen one live and in-person.  My dad was a pretty mechanically-clever guy, and he rigged up an eclipse-viewing box, with a pinhole on one end, and a 'screen' of white cardboard on the opposite end (which, honestly, didn't require that much mechanical cleverness, but still. . .), so we could watch as the 'bite' the moon was taking out of the sun grew.  At that location, the eclipse reached a maximum of something like 85% totality.

There was much dire hand-wringing among the adults that we MUST NOT look directly at the sun, lest we go blind, so dad's little box-viewer was what we had available.  But, naughty boy that I was, I snuck off for a minute or two. I had, from time to time in my young life, squinted with my eyes just barely slitted open, and looked straight at the sun for a couple seconds, so I had reason to doubt the whole 'going blind' thing.  I wondered briefly if there were some sort of special rays or something associated with the eclipse, but decided that I'd done it before, and if I did it again just now, it probably wouldn't be any different.  So I did - just enough to confirm for myself that, viewed directly, through my tightly-slitted eyelids, the sun looked pretty much the same as what we saw in dad's box, so I was mainly content to view the eclipse via the box, for the rest of the duration of the eclipse, although I probably risked a couple more quick views through slitted eyelids.  I think one of the men at the resort had a welding hood with him, which was quite popular with the other vacationers present. . .

Anyway, it was very cool.  As the eclipse approached its maximum totality, the light had a strange, ethereal dimness about it - sort of twilight-ish, except that the sun was high in the sky, and shadows were mid-day short.  Very cool. . .

The event probably stayed in my brain because of the vacation aspect of it, combined with (especially) my mother's anxiety over my impending blindness.  Or, you know, maybe I'm just a nerd. . .

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In the course of 50-plus years since that first eclipse, I've experienced several other solar eclipses; this will be the sixth one in my lifetime to be more than 70% here in Michigan.  Some of them I've taken notice of, some of them came and went without me noticing much.  But there was another one, in May of '94, that is worth telling a story about. . .

The eclipse of '94 was an annular eclipse, meaning that the moon's disk was slightly smaller than the sun's disk (i.e., the moon was at a farther point in its orbit), so it wouldn't completely cover the sun.  But the path of maximum eclipse passed very close to OurTown, so the local news was in more-than-normal 'hype mode' for it.  One of the articles mentioned that a Number 14 welding shade was sufficient to allow viewing of the sun.  So I went to a local welding-supply store, and asked for a Number 14 shade.  "Number 14?" the guy said, when I asked him.  "Jeez, what are you trying to do?  Look at the sun?"  Well, yeah, I said.  "Well, I don't have a Number 14," the guy continued, "but if you slap a Number 6 and a Number 8 together, that's a 14; that ought to work.  I asked if he had a 6 and an 8 handy, so I could check it out.  He handed them to me, and I went out to the parking lot, put the 6 and the 8 together, and looked through them up at the sun, and saw the clear, green-tinted disk of the sun, at a comfortably dim brightness, comparable to the night-lights in my kids' bedrooms.  So the man had himself a sale. . .

A group of 5 or 6 of us played hooky from work for a couple hours on the day of the eclipse and drove to the county fairgrounds, maybe 15 miles from our office, and watched the familiar progression of the moon taking an ever-larger bite out of the sun, while the light took on the other-worldly dimness that I'd been through a few times by then.  At its peak, the sun was 96% blocked out, so the dimness was even more ethereal than usual that day.  My Number 14 welding shade was quite popular with my fellow-truants.

Our location at the fairgrounds was in what was called the 'Graze Zone', where the edge of the lunar disk just 'grazed' the edge of the solar disk, producing a very cool effect. At the height of the eclipse, the sun 'peeked through' the valleys between the lunar mountains, producing a 'string of pearls' effect, with a series of tiny pinpoints of light arrayed in an arc between the 'horns' of the thin crescent of the sun that remained visible.  And we saw it live, mitigated only by the green welding shade. . .

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Up to now, that 'string of pearls' is probably the coolest thing I've ever seen in the sky, although a few other things deserve at least a mention. . .

Halley's Comet came by in 1986, right on schedule, with all the hype that you would expect for a well-known once-in-a-lifetime event.  We have friends who have a farm 30 miles or so from OurTown (away from city lights), so we arranged a Halley's Comet viewing party with them, and the kids we both had at the time.  We actually stayed overnight at their house, and got up at 5AM, to catch the viewing window between when Halley would rise over the eastern horizon, and when the dawn's early light would wash it out.  It was pretty deep in winter at the time, so we ended up trudging across their barnyard in the snow (at 5AM), with temperatures hovering around 10 degrees or so (Fahrenheit; about -12C).

And Halley was pretty much of a dud.  We consulted our star charts, to be sure that we were looking in the right part of the sky, pointed our binoculars at the correct sector of the sky, and saw. . . a little smudge of light that wasn't on the chart.  That's all - just a little smudge.  We had to look several times to convince ourselves that it wasn't just a snowflake on the binoculars.  Once we had convinced ourselves that, by golly, that little smudge was Halley's Comet, we sighed, declared victory, and trudged back to the house to go back to bed.  While our kids wondered what the hell we had hauled them out into the frozen night for. . .

But in 1997, Hale-Bopp was a comet actually worth watching.  I think it took even the astronomer-types by surprise by how bright and prominent it was.  For weeks, there was this large, sort-of V-shaped apparition in the evening sky, visible even walking amid the bright lights of OurTown.  Nothing ambiguous or smudge-y about this one.  Very cool - the best comet I've seen in my young life. . .

In 2012, there was a Transit of Venus, in which Venus passed across the disk of the sun.  It happened rather late in the day here in Michigan, so I took my Number 14 shade to work with me, and at a suitably remote location on my drive home, I pulled off the highway and took a look at the sun.  And sure enough, there was a small black dot in the middle of the sun's disk - Venus, doing its very best to block out the sun (which amounted to something on the order of a 0.1% eclipse).  Not nearly as spectacular as even a partial eclipse, but very cool, nevertheless. . .

(There was also a transit of Mercury just last year, but it happened at an inconvenient time (early in the morning), so I missed it.  Plus, Mercury is both smaller than Venus, and farther from Earth, so it's harder to see.  But I wanted you all to know that I knew about it. . .)

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There are others, I'm sure (I recall a pretty cool triple conjunction involving Mars, Jupiter and the moon, I think), but those are the major highlights of my sky-viewing experience so far.  At least until August 21, I hope. . .