Ask the person who will probably miss seeing a total solar eclipse [Ed. title]

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Hey! Sorry, I had to go directly from the eclipse to a birthday party, and haven’t been home. Anyway:

[QUOTE=Quartz]
So, was it clear?
[/QUOTE]

No - thick and grey. But you know what? It was fantastic. It went completely, middle of the night dark. I was on a hillside outside of town (me and about 2000 others), there was a perfect view of the ocean and outer islands, and then it went dark. Completely, terrifyingly dark. Babies screamed, nature fell still, and we held our collective breath for 2 minutes, ten seconds.

It was the most incredible feeling of relief when the light came back.

And of course, 10 minutes after totality, it cleared right up, so we got to see the partial eclipse.

[QUOTE=mascaroni]
It’s very easy to imagine they thought it was the end of the world.
[/QUOTE]

Yes. I felt that ancestral fear quite clearly.

[QUOTE=Iggy]
So to the OP, how are your street fighting skills? Ready to dispatch your foes quickly and neatly so you can get back to watching the eclipse?
[/QUOTE]

I’m so sorry that happened to you. Happily for me, all bullies here are confiscated by customs and deported to New Guinea.

If you want to see this one, one of our metal bands did this during the eclipse instead of watching themselves. It more or less conveys the eerieness of the experience:

22

My gf is vacationing in Iceland right now. She has limited connectivity, but posted a pic on Facebook of people viewing the sky with CDs. She saw the northern lights the previous night, then the eclipse. Her friend who planned the trip consulted with an astronomer before picking the travel dates.

23

Cloudy on the south coast of England, but at least it went from misty grey to dark grey during the eclipse. For the minutes around (partial, for us – 85% or so) totality, it got cold enough to see one’s breath.

Then of course the bastard clouds cleared up within minutes of the main event and it was bright and sunny the rest of the day. :mad:

24

Centuries ago in China, there was a total solar eclipse just below the eastern horizon.

Dawn broke as usual, but then it started to get dark. Finally it got light again and the sun came up as it always had done.

The Chinese called it the morning of two dawns. It was thought to be just a story from someone’s imagination, but modern scientists went back and searched the records of ancient solar eclipses and sure enough they found one that had occurred below the horizon in China on the date that the people in the area wrote about the “two dawns”.