so a guy brought up his TELESCOPE so people could watch today’s eclipse from the building. we weren’t in the totality range, but we had a really great view! the eclipse photo was taken through the eyepiece of the telescope. :)

I’ve been hesitant to write down my impressions of the total solar eclipse because I honestly don’t know how to describe it. Talking about direct experience is so difficult, there simply aren’t adequate words to convey those deep levels of sensations outside of the land of poetry. Once you insert a layer of language you’ve created a constructed distance between you and your listener. That said, I want to give it a shot because IT WAS THE MOST AWESOME EXPERIENCE EVER!

We (my bestie, C, and her hubby, P), and I set off from Longmont, Colorado at five am. Normally, it’s about a 2.5 - 3 hour drive into Wyoming, so we planned for five. It took us 4.5 hours, mostly on frontage roads along a rather crowded interstate. With more than a bit of back seat driving from P, we got to Guernsey State Park and got a nice spot. The little town of Guernsey (population 200), did such a great job! They were so helpful and kind and really seemed as if they were enjoying having 50,000 people descend on their town, lol. There were thousands of people there but it was pretty quiet. People were hiking, and adjusting their telescopes, and just hanging out. Lots of dogs.

We were on a grassy, shrubby, hilltop (mountain, I guess at 5,000 feet) so we had a great clear view from horizon to horizon. Not a cloud in the sky. That part of Wyoming is high rolling grasslands with the occasional drift of limestone buttes. Dry, spacious and beautiful, with old, brittle cottonwood trees growing alongside small creeks lost in the tall grass; everything is cast in shades of green, gold and brown. Tons of sky. The smell of chapparell was very strong; the perfume of Wyoming, pine and sage, smelling clean and sharp. I saw a newly dead cow down in a shallow ravine and a picked over dead antelope by the side of the road. In the huge valley behind us was an enormous reservoir.

We set up our little tailgate lunch/party, fiddled with our cameras, affixed our special eclipse glasses to our faces, and looked directly at the sun. I had no idea the sun looked like that! I’ve never seen an eclipse before or used those special glasses. I’ve only seen paper sculptures or computer models of the sun, you know, in school or on tv.

It was just this small orange ball in the sky, but it was comforting to see it up there, boiling away and spewing out all this fabulous, warming, life creating radiation. And because of that little nuclear reactor in the sky, all this planet and all its creatures were made possible. Amazing. A little black nibble started to form on the top right. The moon! It was ungodly black. It looked like Vanta black. In the words of Nigel Tuffnell, “there is none blacker.” The excitement started to build.

So this little nibble starts getting bigger and bigger as the moon slides across the sun. It was about at 60% totality when we started noticing there was a change in the light. There was still plenty of light, daytime feel, but there was a change in the quality. It was grayer, steelier, with an odd, coldish cast to the air. But still perfectly normal, lol.

If you were an ancient person you might think a storm was starting to brew, like the way the sky changes before a Tornado happens. At about 85% totality it started getting noticeably chillier and white people’s skin started looking jaundiced. Actually yellow. Shadows were very sharp. Colors were muted. I expected it to be like twilight, but it really wasn’t. It was and it wasn’t. It was weird and kinda neat.

The moon continued its slide until there were just a few bright white beads of light along the edge. The remaining sliver of our sun winked out. We were standing at the edge of the circular shadow of the moon as it raced across the surface of our planet at 1500 miles per hour. Seventy miles in diameter, and in one minute we’d be at the very center of that circle. It was totality!

We whipped off our glasses and looked up. Somebody had thrown a cosmic switch in the nano second between the sun winking out and me removing my glasses. Suddenly, I was standing on an alien planet looking into the sky at an alien gray/black ball of sun. That was not my sun. It was twilight, but unlike any twilight I’ve experienced anywhere on this planet. A few stars had come out.

All around the horizon it was a rosy peach color that faded up into the dark blue sky. We were looking outside the shadow of the moon to where the sun was still shining, 35 miles away. Incredible!

I had never seen anything like that before. It was astonishing. The diaphanous corona was splayed out around the sun, with a great big swath extending off to the upper right. All around me I could hear people hooting and hollering. C burst into tears. All I could do was stand there, staring, saying, “oh my god,” over and over and, strangely, laughing.

It was beautiful. It was stupendous. My heart was beating so fast! It was wonderful in a way that only the most sacred experiences in life can be. It was like sitting with my mother as she died. It was like holding my niece for the first time. It was like the moment I discovered my own goodness (long thought absent) many years ago.

I’d never been so aware of the vastness of the universe, how small we are, how organic and elemental everything is, the connectedness of everything, even unto this seemingly simple orange ball hanging in our sky, the amazing events and coincidences that have happened over countless eons so that I could stand there, aware of my own existence and what was going on around me in those precious seconds. It was humbling, awesome, invigorating and every/any other thing you could possibly think of.

All too soon, two of the shortest minutes to ever exist, it was over. The sheer speed of the universe is frightening. But before the moon began to pull away again nature had one last surprise. A jet was coursing across the sky (my bets are that it was a NASA jet chasing the eclipse), and bisected the sun at the very moment totality ended. Lots of good screaming for that one!

The moon slid off the sun, that weird switch was thrown again and we were back on planet Earth. Things had returned to normal. Our sun had returned. I can completely understand how an ancient person might have freaked the fuck out.

What an exhilarating experience! Practically exhausted, slightly sunburnt and satisfied beyond belief, we sat down.

We hung out for a while watching the sun grow stronger and then drove eight hours home in the midst of the mother of all traffic jams with half a million other people all trying to get home, getting into a spectacular fight on the way because my bestie’s husband is a completely abusive asswipe, but that’s a story for another day. We drove through Nebraska, ffs. NEBRASKA! It took me 24 hours to recover, lol.

I highly recommend to anyone if you have a chance to see a total eclipse in your lifetime, take advantage of it! I don’t know if it will change your life or cause you to reflect on the nature of Life, the Universe and Everything, but it might!

Grade A+ Thanks, cosmos! 👋🏼

Just how precisely can the total eclipse be predicted? As the day swiftly approaches, Stephen Wolfram dives into the mathematical details & explores the history of computing eclipses.