April 8th eclipse and school closings

[apl68]

We had a beautiful Monday morning at my parents' house.  Then the clouds rolled in.  There were enough intermittent gaps in the clouds to allow us to see the different phases of the eclipse.  My repeated efforts to photograph the phenomenon yielded one or two fairly good shots.  At the peak we saw a planet come out but no stars.  And we heard tree frogs start sounding off because they thought that dusk had arrived.  It would have been interesting to see how chickens and other livestock might have reacted.  Unfortunately my brother the hobby farmer didn't live anywhere near the eclipse path, so they didn't have that opportunity.

Here at our library the staff had a major morning surge of people coming to get their eclipse glasses at the last minute.  We ended up with fewer than 150 remaining of several thousand pairs that we had received from the State Library to distribute.  So our efforts at distributing eclipse glasses were a success, and our supply was just about right.

Unfortunately, the staff tells me that it started raining during the eclipse.  The view from our town was a nearly complete washout, so to speak.  I guess in terms of our library's efforts to get people ready to view the eclipse you could say that the operation was a success, but the patient died.

[Langue_doc]

We had a 90% eclipse here in the city. I was with a small group at one of the public places, surrounded by large groups of happy people. When the eclipse reached its totality, the sun was a small sliver to the left. As the moon started moving away, the sliver got larger, but shifted to the bottom so that it looked like a section of an orange standing upright. The photos at 3:25 and 3:58 are exactly what we saw during the eclipse, color-wise and also shape-wise. We started looking soon after the start, and were able to see the changes. The person behind me kept announcing how much time was left for the totality, and also alerted everyone that the exact moment had arrived. We noticed that the temperature kept dropping to such a degree that some of us put on our coats. It also seemed as though the sun was setting. Altogether a very neat experience!

The person next to me observed that here we were, large groups of people of differnt ethnicites, beliefs, political affiliations, but all these differences just fell by the wayside as we were just one group watching a very rare phenomenon. I'm phrasing it rather badly, but I think the gist of it was that there were no differnces or separations.

[apl68]

Our state parks reportedly had some 200,000 visitors on the day of the eclipse.  Traffic problems and other issues proved minimal.  Some towns in the darkest paths of the eclipse complained that big events they had planned fizzled because they had fewer visitors than they had been told to expect.

[Larimar]

Does anyone know why the horizon would be gold like a normal sunset during totality, even though the sun was clearly elsewhere in the sky? I thought that was curious.