I wouldn’t say I was a total-eclipse collector, but I have bagged three of them in my life, which is probably above average. I don’t have an annular eclipse on my scoreboard, though, and the pictures looked pretty dang interesting. But I’d have to drive seventy miles south to get the full effect, and I didn’t have the freedom to take off for another eclipse trip right now. I was almost happy to read that much of the state was going to be overcast. If Mama ain’t gettin’ her eclipse, ain’t nobody…you know. I’m a child.
The last eclipse was basically in the center of Oregon and at the time everyone worried about the entire population of Portland descending on the town of Madras and tipping the whole state up like a skateboard. We were further instructed to worry about setting fire to the place from stray sparks from all the cars parked in the dry grass. We were having trouble at the time keeping the state from bursting into flame.
So this guy on the radio this year was warning us about all that yet again, although, he said, “the traffic jams and smoke predicted last time never materialized.” My radio blew up at that point due to a heavy object being thrown at it. Maybe the roads leading back to Portland were running better than expected. I would point out, however, that the roads south, carrying Crater Lake tourists and about 100,000 Californians, were not only jammed to the point of not moving at all, but also basically on fire. There’s just nothing quite like being dead-parked on a four-lane highway with several thousand other people, watching the smoke roll in. Jammed? We were in the car for twelve and a half hours. To go 240 miles. There were four of us in the car and although I couldn’t have picked a better crew to go down in flames with, I felt strongly at the time that I still had some living to do.
Anyway, this eclipse I was going to stay home. It was mid-October in western Oregon and it was overcast, not to be redundant. I basically forgot about it.
At nine in the morning I noticed a little shadow in the kitchen, heavily implying the existence of sunshine somewhere, however muted, and I remembered we were close to the time of totality. You could tell where the sun was in the sky, so that was something, although it was behind a scrim of high clouds. Dave and I went up to the tower, which did put us about forty feet closer to the sun. Even through the clouds, you really couldn’t look at the sun. We blinked at it for a nanosecond here and there but it was not possible. I wasn’t absolutely certain what time the thing was going to Go Off and so after about ten minutes I turned to go back downstairs and gave it one more glance.
Whoa! Suddenly I could look at the sun! And you could see the disk of the moon! With the ring around it! No, it was not quite total here, and there still was that high cloud cover, but it was unmistakable, and I only had a bright green blob with a red ring around it in my vision afterwards for about a half hour. It looked like Glinda the Good Witch on her way into Munchkinland. I had myself Christmas-worthy retinal damage and it was totally awesome.
Ten years from now, when my vision deteriorates completely, I’ll still have that memory. Well, you know. Maybe.
Y’know… I hear a lot about these “once in MY lifetime” celestial events. And. In theory, I would like to witness them. However. They usually happen at some ungodly hour of the night. I go to bed early and wake up early. Plus, here where I live, there is a LOT of light pollution AND mosquitoes. I’d rather TRY to sleep (it’s VERY trying sometimes.) As far as solar eclipses go, I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed a complete one. Possibly a partial, where it just got a little bit dim. I was underwhelmed.
I feel the same. But a friend told me about a similar experience with meteor showers…meteor storms rather.
In the early ’60’s his family was living in Albuquerque, his dad worked for the BIA. They knew about this predicted meteor event, and went out into the desert to watch. They had clear skies, and no ambient light.
My friend said at the beginning, there were a few, a couple a minute, then it suddenly increased
From the same direction, several came, many were in the sky at the same times. There was no sodium light to distract, the milky way was visible.
He said for a minute, they were coming from the same dire/cction, and he and his dad had the sensation of being on a surface, hurling through space, watching the meteors stream by as they were the ones moving.
He went on to be a engineer, and designed the Benaroya concert hall in Seattle.
There have been some meteor storms that people could read the newspaper by. 1799 and 1833 come to mind–because I inserted them into my first novel!
That is because partial eclipses are underwhelming! We’ve got another total one coming up in 2024 and it will most assuredly be in the daytime. I recommend it if you’re nearby. Also, a lot of celestial events seem to be things I need to set an alarm for, and rarely do–but if you get up before dawn, that’s often very good for meteor showers.
I assume that first one was in ’76. I was at OHSU, we had a case cancelled in the cath lab, so the other cardiology fellows and I went outside. It got darker for a few minutes, the birds around there started doing their ‘going to bed’ chirping, then it started getting lighter.
We went back inside for the next angiogram of the day.
The ’76 one was my second (first was 1970, I think, in North Carolina). If you were in OHSU you were in the path of totality and in the fog entirely. No one in Portland saw it. Mary Ann and I drove out to Goldendale.
I’ve never experienced a total eclipse. Not even an annular eclipse. Just the one where you see a crescent.
I can sympathize with you, Murr on living in a state where all the good stuff seems to happen when the sky is overcast. NJ is nowhere near as wet as Oregon used to be, but we do seem to time the significant celestial stuff for when the clouds roll in.
That said I have seen the space station go over several times, a rocket launch and a spectacular Leonid meteor shower. Had to get up at some ungodly hour in the morning and drive out into the Pine Barrens to find a relatively low light polluted sky. Also dig an elderly friend out of his easy chair to go along. But then we saw thousands of meteors. I’d do it again.
I do wish I’d been out in Wyoming to see that Leonid shower. Several years ago I made a freight run to Utah and on the way back we checked out the fossil fish mother lode far off the interstate and hundreds of miles from any significant sized town. I could see the stars as we were driving down the road. Pulled over and there was the Milky Way and such a brilliant array of stars that it was hard to pick out the constellations. I’d do that again in a heartbeat.
If I could add in all the things I’d like to live with but don’t–you can’t get it all–I’d take dark skies, northern lights, fireflies, and loons.
I’d choose the same. Thanks.
Absolutely! Right there with you Murr.
And spring peepers. And ALL the salamanders. Oh dear: I’m in a red state!
It’s rare to read something that leaves me smiling…thank you again!
Well now you’ve done gone and made me smile. Thanks.
I too live in Portland…. and was underwhelmed with the darkening of the sky and then the lightening of the sky. Funny how it resembled cloudy-uncloudy-cloudy-uncloudy of many fall days. got some pictures of smeary dark clouds near a shining object-d-sky. But that last one- I was near Corvallis and it was a stunner. Worth the 5 hrs it took us to drive back.
Five hours! ‘Tain’t nothin’!
Of course you will still have that memory. Well I hope you will.
I hope I have any.
I’ll always remember the Peanuts strip with Linus holding his two-sheets-of-cardboard pinhole camera — in a downpour.
I’m guessing this one was the March 1970 eclipse: Some friends and I drove from central CT to the MA coast to see the eclipse that was total on Martha’s Vinyard. The money on the island got sick of the growing crowd of astronomers so it got the last ferry to the island cancelled, and we were left on the edge of someone’s backyard on the coast, watching a partial eclipse.
For this last one, it was overcast here, 35 mi. NE of SF.
Huh! I was on the outer banks of NC. I wonder what the path of totality was? Because we couldn’t see it in northern Virginia.
I think it was the one shown at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_eclipses_in_the_20th_century#/media/File:SE1970Mar07T.png
Here in NJ the last partial eclips was in 2017. But the Big One is coming in April of 2024. A total eclipse that will occur in an area where we can actually see it! The path of totality is passing right over the Ticonderoga, NY and Burlington, VT area. Our cabin in the Adirondacks is only about a half hour south so we have it on our calendar to be up there for it! I will need to get those special glasses so I can actually look. For the partial one in 2017 I got out my old colander with holes in it and held it up and I got a whole bunch of little reflected crescents on my deck. But for this I suppose I would like to have the glasses!
Pretty sure you can take them off for the totality though. Enjoy! I will probably miss this one.
IIRC, there’s plenty of UV in the corona, so that’s not a good idea.
After we came back from watching the 2017 total eclipse at a friend’s house in Wyoming (1.5 hour trip there, 5 hours back), we started planning for 2024: a week and a half before our 15th anniversary and my birthtown is smack dab in the middle of the path of totality. I haven’t been back to Stephenville NL since I was six months old. It would make a fun, special trip. Then I checked out the weather record for that date in the previous ten years: snowing in nine of them. Plans change.