On Dragons Swallowing the Sun
Well worth a miserable drive...
You may not have heard, but there was a somewhat notable event yesterday…
The line of totality for the total eclipse of 2024 passed a bit north of us, across the Adirondacks. I had a vague idea of taking the kids up to Lake Placid, where a college classmate of mine runs a brewery and there are other things to do in case of inclement weather. The Pip had baseball until 11am, though, so we weren’t able to get on the road early enough to be confident of making it there, so we settled for just heading as far north as I thought we could get. That turned out to be Frontier Town, a campground with a big parking lot right off Exit 29 of the Northway. We were, um, not the only ones to have this idea…
We got there about half an hour before the start of the eclipse, an hour and a half before totality, and there were already hundreds of people gathered. We wandered around a bit (the line for the bathrooms was insane, but it was too crowded to pee in the woods…), then settled into a spot on a few picnic tables that were pushed up against the lodge building. This gave us a pretty reasonable view of the Sun and a bunch of high wispy clouds.
The kids and I had eclipse glasses from a stock purchased by the department (one of my colleagues arranged a bus trip to Plattsburgh during the day, but I had to wrangle my own kids), and the hour between the first contact between Sun and Moon was pushing the limits of their patience. As it got closer to totality, though, they started to get into it— looking up regularly to exclaim over the shrinking solar disk, and commenting on the fact that it got distinctly cooler well before it got actually dark.
I had never previously made a trip to see a total eclipse, just seen a couple of partials through clouds (an annular one in DC thirty years ago, and a half-ish one in 2017). All the astronomy people I know (and the xkcd guy) swear up and down that a total eclipse is a million times cooler than even a very high partial one, but I was skeptical. After all, these are people who get excited about planetary conjunctions, which are just two dots of light being sorta-kinda close to one another.
Having now seen one, I have to admit: they were right. Or, as one ex-Twitter user put it:
When the last little dot of Sun got covered, there was an audible gasp from the hundreds of people watching at Frontier Town. It’s not quite right to say that it’s dark like nightfall— the light from the corona is at least comparable to a bright full moon— but it’s freaky. In a way that I can’t really explain, and that phone pictures can’t come close to capturing:
Colors and shadows looked weird, but the sky off near the horizon looked like daylight. But most of all, the Sun is replaced by a diffuse-looking ring of light with a black center.
If we hadn’t known it was coming, this would’ve been one of the most shocking things ever. Even knowing to the minute when it was due to start, it was breathtaking. The tiniest fraction of Sun exposed is still too bright to look at except through the filter glasses, but once it’s covered, it’s bright but not hard to stare at (and hard not to stare at…) And it ends just as quickly— we had about two minutes of totality, and with a few seconds to go several people around us said “Oh! I can definitely see it’s moving— AAAAH!” because as soon as a tiny bit got uncovered, it was instantly painfully bright again.
So I can’t imagine how this would’ve struck someone before the era of accurate eclipse predictions (which, to be fair, goes back a lot farther than you might think) and the tech to make solar filter glasses. The unfiltered Sun definitely dims— as I said, it got noticeably cooler as the partial phase went on— but it’s not like you can see the Moon taking a bite out of it without heavy filtering. Without the glasses, it would’ve been vaguely weird and unsettling, then bam!, Bizzarro World for two minutes. That would’ve been absolutely fucking terrifying.
I brought my DSLR with the telephoto lens, so got a bunch of shots of the Sun during totality; the best of these is at the top of this post. I also have a bunch of pictures of the kids wearing eclipse glasses, which I will not post here in the interest of not having them push me out to sea on an ice floe once I’m too old to resist them.
The kids were super fired up, which was gratifying. That mostly sustained us through the drive home, which suuuuuuuuuucked— the way we were parked, we needed to start off on US 9, rather than getting right on the highway, and after crossing over I-87 and seeing the traffic, I elected to stay on the smaller road. Which was okay until we hit Warrensburg, at which point it took literally 45 minutes to go about five miles. I ended up bailing out onto very rural roads, without the benefit of Google Maps plotting a route— the cell network was overloaded enough that my phone wouldn’t reliably connect. I could see my position on a map on the phone, which was a significant upgrade over the paper-map era in which I learned to drive, but still an adventure. One of my bright ideas turned out to rely on a “seasonal” road, leading to some significant back-tracking before we finally got to a reasonable route far enough west to be clear of traffic from NYC day-trippers that I could get Google to lead us home. What would normally be an hour and a half via the Northway was closer to three and a half hours when all was said and done.
That said, it was 100% worth it. That was genuinely one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen, and if you find yourself within a few hours’ travel of a total eclipse, I highly recommend making the effort.
So, yeah, that was an experience. I usually at least tease the possibility of “more like this…” before the subscription button, but… yeah. Anyway, here’s the button:
And if you have your own eclipse anecdotes to share, the comments will be open:
We drove from Atlanta to Indianapolis on Sunday, and then drove back after watching it at the motor speedway (which was cool in it's own way, so we had stuff to look at while waiting for it all to begin). It took about 11 and a half hours to get home (hurray, in bed at 4:30 this morning), but it was absolutely worth it. The girl scouts who were selling cookies to all the people waiting to get out of the parking lot made an absolute killing.
I drove from north Alabama to western Kentucky with a friend. Did not think we were going to make it as the Google Maps travel time kept increasing, but we were able to divert to a spot just inside the zone of totality that avoided the traffic in Paducah, Kentucky. (We had planned to cross over into Illinois.) It's an amazing experience. I saw the 2017 one at the Nashville Zoo with my family, and when it got dark, the giraffes just started running around like crazy.