Those ripply shadows are known as “shadow bands.”
I learned something today I didn’t know before. Different total eclipses have different amounts of totality.
This one had, at most, around 2 minutes and forty seconds of totality. The one coming in 2024 will have well over four minutes of totality. And some eclipses have even more than that.
I can’t wait for 2024.
The 2024 eclipse runs from Austin to Boston (or so- had to do the rhyme).
This was my 4th total eclipse, plus one transit of Venus.
We left early Sunday, heading toward Hopkinsville, KY. Traffic was horrendous due to detours around Cincinnati. We finally arrived in Hopkinsville late, and just fell into bed. Monday we drove a little, looking for a good place to view the eclipse. We settled on a large yard half-filled with cars. The people charged us $10 to park there. There were about 30-ish people there, none of whom had ever seen a previous eclipse. So we became the explainers of science and debunkers of misconceptions. I explained to them about the little crescents on the driveway and showed them the 360-degree sunset during totality.
During the minutes leading up to totality, the house owner was going on and on about how scientists were just guessing about the time. I told him scientists have know for a long time when totality would start, and my watch was calibrated. So the guy bet me $100 that the time would be off. At “T minus 1 minute” I started a countdown. As soon as I said “zero”, the diamond ring flashed and totality began. The guy said I must be some kind of wizard.
We’ll be able to see the 2024 eclipse by just stepping outside and looking up.
Dopefest 2024!!!
duplicate post, so nm.
I went to South Carolina to a hippy commune that my buddy and his friend bought 25 years ago in anticipation of this eclipse. This was after me and some friends drove down to Cabo San Lucas in 1991 for the total eclipse of the sun. We had over 7 minutes of totality. Pretty good planning on the parts of those guys. The other dude drove a hippy bus all the way from Boston to Cabo.
We had spotted cloudiness and then a small cloud blocked a great deal of the partial eclipse, but some kind of miracle happened and the cloud just disappeared just before onset of totality. I bought a package from Celestron that included a camera filter, but most of my photos came out pretty shitty. It was pretty spectacular.
My buddy got married on the day of the eclipse in the most hilarious hippy weddings I’ve ever been to. It was right out of the seventies/Burning Man. The commune was pretty bitchin’ too. It’s on a lake and a river runs through it.
I had the same experience in South Carolina, to which I also had to travel long distance though probably not as far as you did. But at least I was with friends and that made it a lot easier to bear. I hope you weren’t alone.
I’ve said it many times over the past few days–Mother Nature can be an icy-hearted cast iron bitch sometimes.
Where were you in South Carolina? The closest big city to me was Clemson. Thank god the cloud burned away.
We live about an hour from Greenville, SC, so we drove down there in the morning. Furman University had a big festival going on, with science activities for the kids (run by various campus clubs and Greek organizations–my favorite was the sorority whose science was all about how pearls and diamonds are formed 
), an astronomer to narrate and point cool things out, and, most importantly, unlimited water and access to bathrooms.
The partial eclipse was fine. The totality was the greatest spectacle I’ve ever seen, and among the most moving events of my life.
I saw the eclipse at a small Kentucky village (Salem). Saw the alpha and omega of traffic jams on the way back. Here are my images:
Moncks Corner, thirty or so miles north-ish of Charleston.
Right here is where the thunderstorm came in, where I was.
Two-thirds coverage isn’t quite enough to cause noticeable non-astronomical effects, i.e. other than that you can look at the sun with eclipse glasses and see that some of it’s missing. But when you get to like 80% or higher, then the light definitely does start to look weird.
Well, there is always 2078.
Yeah. Basically, what’s weird is that the light starts approaching the (lesser) intensity of overcast and heavily overcast light, but without the diffusion that cloud cover provides. You still have well-defined shadows and directionality of the light, but its intensity is much lower. It’s really weird. It’s a little bit like looking through untinted sunglasses, or something like that, but the effect surrounds you (rather than stopping at the edges of your sunglasses.) It’s definitely surreal. I think we started noticing around two thirds coverage that things were starting to cool down and get slightly dimmer, but, you’re right, that it’s not really obvious until a little closer to 3/4 or 7/8 coverage.
We viewed from Cahokia Mounds, southern IL’s answer to Stonehenge. The idea of watching a total eclipse from the ruins of an ancient civilization was quite pleasing…especially since we had wide-open fields plus an air-conditioned visitor’s center with restrooms. The view was fantastic and we had 44 seconds of totality. The most striking thing was the weirdness to the light as it got dimmer…very otherworldly, quite different from normal twilight. The crickets went nuts and the temperature dropped very noticeably. It was like nothing we had ever seen before…just amazing.
Hey, we wuz there. We were travelling and then took several days to recoup. (Don’t ask.)
FtGKid2 came up to where we were. Took me and a stepgrandkid to McMinnville. Ended up at Linfield college.
It was literally cool, of course. Lots of odd sensations.
Mrs. FtG, meanwhile, was watching some of the coverage live from Linfield and didn’t know we were there. (Lots of cell phone overload.) She only got 99.4%. Bah.
Some stuff people put up on YouTube: This one has a good example of our perspective. Sample TV coverage. Another video.
They had speakers set up to “inform” people with someone from NASA assisting them. Some of the “facts” they dispensed: Earth is the only planet in the Solar System to have solar eclipses. No other planets have them. Apparently there’s uncertainty about whether the Moon moving away from the Earth until there are no more solar eclipses will happen before the Sun turns into a red giant. About that.
I drove > 2400 miles (round trip) and bicycled 345 as part of Cycle Greater Yellowstone. It wasn’t just to see the eclipse, I saw some other scenic stuff like Lower Mesa Falls, St Anthony Dunes, and Earthquake Lake among others.
We started in west Yellowstone and camped in Warm River. On the day of the eclipse we biked ~47 miles to Driggs, ID. They had us on the road early (I left ~5:45AM) and on back roads. The traffic wasn’t too bad but I don’t know what it is normally.
They had us carry our glasses on our bikes and ran a change of clothes the night before (in case the luggage truck could not make it). Turned out not to be an issue. I think I was in camp and set up by 10:30.
The eclipse was very cool (literally, the temps dropped 10-15F). Some smoke on the horizon but not a cloud in the sky.
On the day after the eclipse I biked to Grand Targhee resort and took the ski lift. Employee there say they had 800 up there and thy could see the shadow of the moon move across the valley 
Very glad I did the trip.
Brian