Light got weird

 Today was the eclipse. I was apprehensive that the weather was not going to cooperate and we'd be socked in with clouds. There were some, but you could still mostly see it through the eclipse glasses, and at near-totality, we got the weird dim twilight effect.

I didn't take any photos directly of the eclipse; we had been warned not to use the solar glasses as a filter, that it would mess up the phone camera. That might not have been true; I see others posting theirs online. Oh well. I got to experience it and that's what matters. 

I went out on the patio at about the time they said it would have begun in Dallas. I planned to go back in for a while after seeing the first sliver through the glasses but I just stayed out there. I had also read that even with the light blocking glasses for the eclipse, to only look for a few seconds at a time, so that's what I did.

What I really wanted to know was whether we'd get the "colander effect" through our latticed picnic tables:

No, as it turns out, you can't.

But you can with leaves!

that was fairly near totality. I remember that from the 2017 eclipse, and the annular eclipse that happened this fall. 

I was alone on the patio at first, but eventually a few people drifted out there - some students, the secretary, my department chair. I passed a couple of my spare glasses to some campus visitors* who were there so they could experience it.

I'm glad other people showed up; this feels like something you need to experience communally. One of my few happy memories of 2017 was hanging around in the back parking lot with a group of people for the partial eclipse.

It didn't get DARK dark despite us hitting 99.4% totality. I tried to get a picture, but it doesn't quite convey the oddness of the light - it was like twilight, but from the wrong angle. It almost reminded me of the filtered light you get when there's a lot of wildfire smoke blowing into the area:

The birds were calling - they started as it got dimmer - and I heard both the chorus frogs and the tree frogs that live around the experimental ponds (not really visible from this angle) started calling. 

(*a couple police officers from another town, and someone that I think was an investigator - they are working with a colleague to do some specific evidence testing in a case)

 

 

Though really - this is one of those things that makes you remember you're a part of the world, that humans are really in some ways just animals reacting to their environment (and even though we 100% understand how and why this happens, and that it's not Fenrir eating the sun or something, there still is a sense of the numinous, a reminder that we're part of something much much bigger than we are). And also all the silly stuff - one of the students had eclipse glasses provided by Sonic because he bought one of the (truly disgusting sounding - cotton candy and dragonfruit) "eclipse slushes" they were selling - kind of recedes. (I dislike that kind of marketing, that kind of "let's make the quickest buck we can by throwing up something absolutely tangential to the event - it wouldn't by unlike having a furniture sale to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday)

So we watched for a while, commenting on the weirdness of the light as we passed through totality. Oh, we're all scientists and I admit we didn't cheer or jump up and down (not that I comfortably could at the moment, and I'll probably pay for having stood so long on concrete tomorrow) or any of those kinds of things, but it was more of a quiet appreciation of the cool stuff that happens in our world.

Also, I got an e-mail that the wife of one of the minor admins is collecting unused/gently used eclipse glasses - there's an annular eclipse in Argentina in a couple months and she's got a contact there that she will send them to for folks to use. I have most of the tenpack I bought left (I think I'm going to keep the pair I used, at least for a little while), so I'll drop them off on the way home.