Solar Eclipse

 From Psalm 19

The heavens declare the glory of God;

the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

2Day after day they pour forth speech;

night after night they reveal knowledge.

3They have no speech, they use no words;

no sound is heard from them.

4Yet their voice ^b goes out into all the earth,

their words to the ends of the world.

We were so incredibly blessed to be in the path of totality of yesterday's solar eclipse.  I was watching the weather anxiously for the previous week and the weather people kept saying that we would have a lot of clouds. I just hoped that the clouds would part so we could watch the eclipse.

When yesterday dawned, it was blue skies from horizon to horizon. Over the next few hours, clouds did show up, but they were wispy cirrus clouds and did NOT block the sun at all. So we were able to watch the entire show from about 1:53 p.m. to 4:15 p.m. Not that we watched every minute. We kept running in and out as the moon ate the sun.

I called all the kids outside around 3 p.m. so they could see totality, which was at about 3:08 p.m.

They had their solar glasses!  We were super careful about that for obvious reasons!

Kevin wore his only astronomical shirt.

And then darkness fell at totality and lasted for like two minutes.

It was honestly awesome. Like as in I was full of awe.  I was watching as the last tiny bit of sun disappeared behind the moon and then took off my glasses.

I was expecting the night to be black as pitch. I did not expect a 360 horizon that was somewhat light, and the moon surrounded by the outside glow of the sun's outer bits. I guess not really the sun exactly. It wasn't dangerous to the eyes so wasn't the sun proper.

It was an amazing experience. We were all incredulous and happy.

The picture stinks. There are way better ones on line.

Anyway, yes, we loved it, and were so thankful for decent weather so we could see it.

I didn't know as much about solar eclipses as I thought. This one, the moon was close enough to the earth to completely cover the sun during totality.

There are annular solar eclipses where the moon is a little farther away from the earth and thus looks "smaller" to us and therefore the outer rim of the sun is still there as the moon crosses the middle.

It means that during an annular solar eclipse it doesn't get completely dark.

Very special day.