and this is a word dump of me recording what it was like! feel free to skip it but just for myself i gotta have this Written Down somewhere
i first learned that this eclipse was happening in 2017, the last time a total solar eclipse was visible from the contiguous US, and i immediately knew that if totality was going to happen so close to where i was living, i Had to get to it and experience it myself, so i booked an airbnb for myself and my fiancee (shout outs to @robin-sage) a few months before and, after resolving the flat tire that panicked me by presenting itself the previous Wednesday, our trip began on Sunday the 7th! we woke up nice and early (really it was a regular weekday wakeup time, just early for a weekend) and hit the road around 10 to start driving northwest. i had done some research on state parks in the area (which ones were open, where they were, what facilities they had in them, etc.) and my basic plan was to drive up to where the eclipse was happening, do some scouting/research on what they all looked like in person, and then go back the ~hour south where we were staying. so we drove until around 1 when we got close to montpelier and stopped there for a rest stop and lunch (what a town, from wikipedia: "the 2020 population was 8,074, with a daytime population growth of about 21,000 due to the large number of jobs within city limits"). we continued on from there to Burlington and scoped out a few potential spots on North and South Hero Islands in the middle of Lake Champlain before heading back to our airbnb.
we got settled in for the evening, it was this cute little old farmhouse-lookin place and there was a very affectionate orange cat named Murray. i did a little bit of camera testing, i had bought the camera and a zoom lens and a little mylar filter specifically in preparation for this trip so that i could take photos of the sun before it was fully covered, but i'm not a Photography Guy by any means so i wanted to make sure i had a ballpark idea of what kind of exposure and shutter settings and all the rest that i was gonna use for the eclipse rather than have to figure that out on the day. plus, i 3d printed a couple little doohickeys to slot into the camera to help me to broadly point it at the sun without needing to smush my face against the camera and needed to make sure those worked as i hoped they would (and thank goodness they did, i only got around to printing them over Friday and Saturday and those days were both too cloudy to actually test how they did in sunny conditions so i really dodged a bullet). then we went into the center of town, such as there was one, and ended up getting some surprisingly excellent tacos/enchiladas/smoked chicken wings for dinner before heading back to the bnb and turning in for the night.
then the next morning we woke up and had breakfast (some yogurt and granola, and then we went into town to get sticky buns from a place that was a semifinalist for a James Beard award and they were soooooo good) and then headed north. we ended up going to a place that i had researched but we didn't end up visiting the day before, but Robin had a hunch and it was the absolute correct choice of location, it was this park that was facing southwest (the direction that the sun was going to be) out towards Lake Champlain and had a parking lot with staff directing traffic and port-a-potties and some food stalls, and it was just at just about the maximum of totality that we were gonna get at this longitude, according to my prep it was 3 minutes and 32 seconds of totality. we got there at like 10am for the eclipse that was going to start at 2:15pm our time and i wouldn't have wanted to show up any later, it was Packed. one thing we were a bit leery of was the weather, my phone told me that it was gonna slowly become a bit cloudy between like 2 and 4, but we preferred to commit to one location where we'd done the research and settle in, vs. striking out in some random direction that might or might not have bathrooms and might or might not give us a better view. we found a spot at the park that was pretty perfect (it had a lil concrete pad that was a great stable surface to set up my tripod) and we settled in for the next couple hours as all of the celestial bodies got into position! really the one thing wrong with it was something which i think would have been a problem across a lot of rural vermont, which is that a bunch of people all in the same place meant that i had jack shit for cell service, but on the other hand not having any distractions in that moment was probably extremely good for me.
another thing i knew i needed to plan around was my camera hardware, the camera's little fold out screen was a dinky LCD that wasn't very clear in the sun, which would pose a problem if those are the precise conditions under which i wanted to take pictures lmao. so to counteract that i brought my laptop and spent the first like hour taking test photos of the sun and then taking the SD card out of the camera to load the pictures onto my computer and seeing if i got the exposure and focus right, and then back to try it again, etc. etc., but i'm soooo glad i had the time to do that before The Moment of Truth because it meant i could actually focus on the experience and what it was like in that moment. i also took the time to test an app i downloaded, its an "eclipse timer" app made by a doctor who's just really hype about eclipses, it has vocal announcements for each of the moments in the eclipse like "first contact [the moon beginning to move over the sun] in 10 seconds" "second contact [the sun completely covered by the moon] in 10 minutes, observe for changes in ambient temperature", and using that was a really good decision, both because it was neat to have those announcements accurate to the second based on my GPS coordinates, but also because i know i would have spent the whole time straight up if i didn't have someone in my ear saying "HEY STUPID LOOK AT THE HORIZON THERE'S A 360 DEGREE SUNSET"
to that point, i had done a good deal of research so there were like 6 different Objective External Changes that i was looking out for:
- temperature changes (the temperature drops by like 5 full degrees since the earth isn't getting as much sun on it)
- pinhole shape changes (when the sun goes through a tiny pinhole its image is displayed on the surface on which it's being projected, but flipped 180 degrees because each ray travels in straight lines, like a camera obscura or the back of your eye)
- shadow clarity (the sun's light is basically being limited to a slit but only in one direction, so that same flipping phenomenon from the last point means that the light will diffract by different amounts in the vertical vs horizontal, i.e. shadow edges parallel to that slit will be sharp/defined and shadows perpendicular to them will be blurry)
- shadow bands (that same slit phenomenon means that atmospheric turbulence will cause the light to refract in different amounts as it travels through the atmosphere, and if conditions are right you can see some wiggly lines on the ground in the couple of seconds before and after totality)
- changes in color vision (since it's getting darker, your rods are doing more of the work of helping you see, but rods only give you brightness information/black and white info, so the color in everything starts to slowly appear progressively more desaturated)
- animal behavior (daytime birds go to bed because they think it's night, nighttime birds start to wake up for the same reason, crickets come out and start to chirp, honeybees that navigate by the sun return to their hives or land in place)
i think i witnessed 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6! and the great thing about this app was that some of the reminders specifically are to look out for these sorts of changes, which, again, good to have someone reminding me to look around me
so at about 2:10 the app sent its first notification that was like "first contact in 5 minutes" and it began! honestly i was kind of surprised at how quickly i could see the moon start to cover the sun, i knew that there would be over an hour between first contact and second contact so the fact that i could almost immediately see the little slice that the moon was taking was pretty neat!
and then over the next 70ish minutes my world completely changed. i knew what to look for because of the research that i'd done and hearing other people's testimonies about witnessing eclipses, and the app making the announcements to prompt me about what to look out for, but it was so insane to actually experience it for myself. absolutely indescribable. and i'm so fucking glad i had the camera on hand to ground me and give me something to focus on, i had to keep reorienting it to keep the sun centered in the frame and tinkering with the ISO and all the rest, and all of that helped me not Completely lose my mind but boy it was fuckin close
like, first (i had made a little pinhole projector out of a paper towel tube, some aluminum foil, paper, and tape) over the course of the hour, the little circle cast by the pinhole slowly smushed into a semicircle and then a crescent, i didn't do a great job of poking the hole but it was distinctly a different shape. and, after a bit i started to get a little bit cold, it was like 50 out and i was in a hoodie and started to need to cross my legs over one another, but it was a sunny afternoon day? and, robin had a green sweater that day and was sitting in a red chair, and both of the colors there progressively started getting greyer and greyer. and, suddenly at like 10 minutes before totality, i heard a completely new birdcall that i hadn't heard earlier in the afternoon, and the seagulls that were flocking around the lake for the previous few hours suddenly flew over our heads to find somewhere to land on solid ground (unfortunately i think it was a bit too cold for crickets so i didn't hear any of that, plus the crowds of people that were probably drowning out quiet noises like that)
really it was that 10 minute period (~5 minutes before totality, totality, and the following few minutes) that was the craziest part of it. like i said we were looking southwest, and we all slowly noticed that the sky was going dark all around us, that kind of dark blue after the sun sets but before the sky is completely dark, but in all directions and not preceded by the sky turning red from the sunset. about 20 seconds before totality, prompted by the app, i took my filter off my camera and started taking photos, and i'm so so so glad i was able to capture that last few seconds of sunlight and first few seconds of the eclipse, i had heard about the "diamond ring effect" as the moon moves over the sun, which is when you can begin to see the corona of the sun on the shadowed side but there's a tiny little bit of exposed sun surface left, and i managed to capture it (as seen in the fourth attached image)!!!
and then the next 3 and a half minutes. like, oh my gd. it was just incredible. if it wasn't for the fact that i wanted to keep pushing the shutter button i would have spent the whole time gaping at the sky and saying "what?? what?????" and even with the camera to focus on, i spent about half of the time doing that anyways. like i said, i had seen people talk about their experiences watching eclipses and how difficult it was to put into words, i knew it was going to happen, i'd done extensive research about it and knew when it was going to happen with precision down to the level of a second or two, i was planning to record it in multiple different ways, and there was just no way to prepare for how WRONG it felt
i was talking with robin on the ride home and i think it's a thing of, the experience is a "more of the sum of its parts" thing? like, i've seen sunsets, but not in all directions! i've experienced my vision going black-and-white in the dim dusk light, but that's preceded by the sky going red, the sky doesn't go directly from Daytime to Dusk in 15 minutes! i've heard birds chirping at nighttime, but not at 3:00 in the middle of april! i've been cold, but not so starkly and immediately after being warmed by the sun on a mostly-cloudless day! i’ve seen stars in the sky before, but not during the daytime!! i've seen photos of eclipses, the black circle ringed by white sunlight, but not right in the spot that the sun just was!!!!
robin said afterwards that she just kept thinking about how biblical angels are depicted as wheels of light that inspire existential terror in whoever sees them, and she's completely right, it was a sight that was so completely alien and incomprehensible that even with all my prep i was physically shaking, and not just because i was significantly colder than i was 15 minutes before. i can completely understand why people pre-astronomy thought the world was ending or that the gods were angry. like, sitting here mid-afternoon typing this out is enough to get me to well up and feel a lump in my throat just remembering it, it was so impactful and emotional and awe-inspiring and moving, i've described things in the past as being a "spiritual experience" but absolutely nothing i've ever experienced compares to it. i'm fucking hooked. between the camera, lens cover, tripod, gas, new tires, airbnb reservation etc., i spent hundreds of dollars on this trip and i'll spend however much money i need to if i can experience this again; the only reservation i have about the experience was that there was some cloud cover, but that means that there's a future in which i experience the eclipse with more clarity and detail!!!!!
and then it was over! i'm honestly glad that there was a bunch of time between 3rd contact (sun first emerging again) and 4th contact (moon moving completely off the sun) because that was one of the most un-grounding experiences i've ever had and i needed to sit there with it for like half an hour before there was any chance i was gonna trust myself behind the wheel of a car. i also think a lot of the people there showed up for the totality and were all set once the sun first reemerged, but there was still interesting stuff going on, and if i had traveled all this way i was gonna get photos of the thing for the whole 2 hours 22 minutes and 47 seconds that i had for taking them. plus, imma let everyone else clear out so that it isn't a complete circus to use the port-a-potty before we leave and get out of the parking lot.
however, according to my airbnb host they were expecting like 150k people to come to vermont for the weekend, and evidently many of them did what we did and decided not to stay on monday night, but the trouble is that vermont is served by about 2 interstates in total. so we headed out and got about 45 miles down some state highways that my phone said was the best way to get back, and then we hit some traffic. and the traffic simply kept happening. through most of this phase of the drive, we were moving at walking speed, MAXIMUM. and, since it was rural vermont and thousands of other people were doing the same thing we were, we had fuckall service for most of that span of time, which was whatever until i accidentally closed the map app and it couldn't figure out how to get us back without the offline data that it had apparently deleted, so we kept getting closer and closer to The Next Turn without knowing where we were going next with not much in the way of visual cues through the streetlightless pitch darkness. we spent like 3 hours traveling a distance that, according to the maps i can access now that i've got a working internet connection, to be around 7 miles. it took For Fucking Ever.
and then even once we got onto an interstate, so was Absolutely Everyone Else, so we sat in what my phone said was a 45 minute traffic delay, followed by a 20 minute traffic delay. we didn't cross the VT/NH border until around 11:30pm. robin and i were talking about it and we lowkey think it was because of different traffic cultures that didn't merge (ha) together well, because we followed I91S down the VT/NH border, and almost immediately once we got on I89S, suddenly there were way fewer NJ and NY license plates and we were going highway speeds again; yes it was also due to splitting the traffic between 2 interstates but there was like, a driving etiquette difference that i felt, i was much more confident that i knew what everyone around me was gonna do once we got to NH. but anyways, we drove until like 1 in the morning when we had to stop for some gas, i made myself a PBJ for dinner, then we went that final hour and a half, and we passed tf out almost immediately once we got home.
going into it i was worried that i had built it up to be something more than it was going to be, i was lowkey wondering if i was going to be disappointed in it, and that couldn't be further from reality. i have a habit of sending snapchats to a bunch of friends at 4:20 each day because it cracks me up, and i captioned Monday's "i just saw a total solar eclipse and i'm Different now". and i was being kind of facetious but honestly? i really do think there's a "before eclipse" me and a "post eclipse" me, i was listening to a podcast on a walk yesterday where a psychologist who's also an eclipse chaser talked about what it's like to experience one (and the Shtick this podcast episode did was that she talked about it for the amount of time that the eclipse would be visible in texas, 4:35 or so) and i found myself tearing up; i'm not a crier! this doesn't happen! or, it didn't, and maybe now it does. it was one of the most amazing experiences of my life, and i feel so lucky to now have a concrete answer to the question "what was the craziest 10 minutes you've ever experienced in your life?" because even with the PitA that getting home was, the fact i could drive 3 hours and experience something Like That is such an unbelievable privilege and i'm so, so thankful that i live a life where making this trip was an option for me.
and i can't fucking wait until the next one.