I went with my son to see the sun; more specifically, the total solar eclipse of the sun. We drove 1800 miles in two days and watched the eclipse from a mountain top accessible only by a logging road, 17 miles outside of the town of Sweet Home, Oregon. I really didn't know what to expect, but here is what I saw:
Through my 'eclipse' glasses the sun looked roughly as illuminated as the moon, except that this was an orange moon. Everything else, besides that orange 'moon' was inky black. Then a black sphere, starting in the north east portion of that moon, started eating away at it. In the beginning it looked like the Apple logo. Then it looked like a fat banana. Then a crescent. Then a tiny crescent sliver. Then it disappeared. While this was going on, I could see from around the sides of my little eclipse glasses, that we were moving quickly from day to night, including the growing sounds of crickets and cicadas. But the real pay off, the thing that I wasn't really expecting, and which proved to be the most amazing thing I had ever seen in my entire life, was that when the sun was totally eclipsed and I could see nothing but blackness through my eclipse glasses, I could then look at the sun, or the eclipsed sun, with my naked eyes. The moon was dark, but not completely dark. It was illuminated by the reflection of those parts of the earth that were not being totally covered by the moon's shadow, so you could see the surface of the moon in amazing detail. But surrounding that dark moon was the sun's corona. Still pictures of the corona do not do it justice. It is a mass of roiling, boiling, silver gasses spread out for millions of miles in all directions. Suddenly I experienced, for the first time, the majesty and awesome power of the sun. Not the gentle, warming, comforting sun, that we are used to, but a terrifyingly gigantic, smoking engine; an unfathomably powerful ancient generator that energizes every living thing on this planet and keeps the entire solar system and all of us in its orbit. We are all falcons and suddenly we get to glimpse the falconer; an immediate, visceral sense of the power of this universe and our total dependence on it.
If you saw it, you will know exactly what I mean. If you didn't see it, make your plans NOW to see the next total eclipse, which will arrive on April 4, 2024. The band of totality in the United States will spread from Texas to Maine. This time, God willing, I will be flying, not driving. Driving that distance in two days at my age was a stretch. In seven years it will be an impossibility.
See you there!
