Well, it could've gone better

[conuly]

I wanted to be there right when the museum opened - missed that by about an hour.

DID get the glasses. Boy, those were something. They seemed completely opaque until you looked up at the tiny, orange, dim sun. (The kids sold theirs to people even later than we were!)

Missed the lecture due to some miscommunication. Didn't see other exhibits, same reason.

But we did enjoy looking at the sun through the (shared) glasses, and the kids really loved making pinhole projectors on index cards. I'd expected they would - they wrote their names and all!

One thing that was not explained to me in the documentation, but in retrospect should've been obvious: The dimmer the light got, the closer the index cards had to be to make a clear image. At the beginning, having one on the ground and one in your hand was good enough. By the midpoint, when it was 70% covered and dark (and when we were done) they had to be right next to each other.

Several people, hearing me launch into another spiel on how "our eyes work the same way" and "the image is backwards and upside down - look, compare it! - but when it happens in our eyes our brains automatically flip it" asked if I was a teacher or a scientist! LOL. Only the former in a very *literal* sense, but this is something I've known since I was six or so. I had a book on the structure of the eye. (I didn't say that. I just said I homeschool and I made the kids listen to me talk to them about it.)

And then on the way back we talked about the Statue of Liberty and all. I heard a tour guide the other day say that the original model for the face was the sculptor's girlfriend, not his mother as in the finished version, but I don't know if that's correct. Still, "she looked too sexy" is obviously a story that's hard to give up!

Comments

[shadowkat]

It got dark where you were? Didn't get dark at all in Jamaica. Just looked like it does when it's overcast or a cloud goes over the sun. I did get to use my glasses and shared them with co-workers. Who used them to take pictures.

[conuly]

Not dark-dark, you're right - but dark enough that you could notice it and it had an effect on my pinhole index cards. Not like being overcast, though. When it was overcast (which happened for five minutes at the peak!) we couldn't get a projection through a pinhole at all!

[kalloway]

A-ha! I had to adjust my box projector quite a bit towards the peak and now I know why. (And now I feel like I should have figured it out myself.)

I'm not sure how I'd described the dark - a dimness, maybe? Going outside right before the peak, the light just felt 'wrong', somehow. And then going inside right after, to go back to bed, I had to turn on lights.

[wpadmirer]

Hey, you saw it! That was better than us. It was overcast where we were. (We were on the road at the time.) So no way to see the sun. Though it did get darker under the clouds, so we knew it was happening.

[conuly]

We had a lot of cloud cover, but we pretty much always had a patch of sun right up until the middle - which was a bummer, but whatever.

[conuly]

It took me a long time to work it out!

[adafrog]

"she looked too sexy" is obviously a story that's hard to give up!
lol Love it.

[archangelbeth]

Nifty!!

We were so far north that we just got... a weird, grayish quality to the light. Like, there were shadows, and some of it might've been a thin, hazy cloud that was over the sun at one point, but... it was just weird. There wasn't enough light in the atmosphere for where the sun was, or something.

Ah, well!

[offcntr]

The light is dusk-like, but the wrong color. Afternoon sunlight turns golden, shading toward orange and red as sunset approaches. This has the same attenuation, but the color is still white. I noticed it most after staring through the Eclipse glasses for a while then taking them off. Change in light levels is so gradual that it takes a time lapse for it to be obvious.

Wasn't going to be total in Eugene, so I insisted we drive the 45 minutes to Corvallis, and it did not disappoint.

[conuly]

If we'd been that close to totality, I would definitely have traveled to see it! Sounds awesome! I'm making my plans for 2024 already :)

[author_by_night]

Sorry you missed some things! But glad you seem to have still had a good time.

[flexagon]

"Oh god. When we said to give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free, we didn't mean it THAT way."

[kyrielle]

My husband described it as "like it's hazy, except it isn't."

That's not quite it either. But it's close.

[adafrog]

lol