Reaction to yesterday's solar eclipse

Quick post here - yesterday I was part of a group that traveled down to Wapakoneta, Ohio, near the middle of the totality region. Behold, Ohio, and you did look and feel like Ohio.

And actually, automobile traffic there was fine. I had read all manner of horror stories and prepared myself for a terrible trip there or, especially, back… maybe our anticipated 7:00 PM return will instead be a 4:00 AM return! Nah, it was an 8:00 PM return with a long rest stop.

And totality was awesome! I wondered a bit, before we left Lansing, just how much of a difference is there between 96% coverage of the Sun (in Lansing), and 100% (Wapakoneta). Quite a bit, turns out. 4% of the Sun is still quite bright. And there is nothing quite like seeing the shadow of the Moon sweep over you. It got quite dark, bats and bugs came out (perhaps to become very confused four minutes later), the humans present at our location clapped when it was all over. It was cool. Photos don’t do it justice (hard to capture that corona), but a couple from my cell phone during totality.

A couple reactions I had (you know, aside from “I finally saw it myself!”):

One, I enjoy it when nature reasserts itself. We live in a technological age, our electric lights have conquered the night. It’s pleasant to see that wiped away from time to time. In Michigan this happens most often with a big snowstorm. Not only do people find it hard to get about but, especially in neighborhoods, the streets disappear - we might say they cease being part of the manufactured environment, and rejoin anew the natural environment, and you feel a little bit like people might have felt a few hundred years ago. It troubles me that our technological control gets a little more complete every year, it’s good for us to lose that from time to time.

Similarly here - total solar eclipses are dramatic events, and they happen on nature’s timetable, in nature’s chosen location. If you want to see one, you have to go to it, it isn’t coming to you.

And two, it really drove home, in a visceral and impactful way, that we live in an astronomical system, and made you feel a bit small, perhaps. Of course we know, in an intellectual way, that the Moon is always up there, in orbit of the Earth… but it’s something else when you see its shadow creep up the horizon, watch the disc of the Moon slowly cover up the disc of the Sun and then move away. You “feel” now like you’re part of this system in motion (I did anyway). We know, in our minds, that there are always stars up there, even in the daytime, but day and night feel very different to us… but look, there, when the Moon hides the Sun for a moment, there are stars in the daytime. Because we’re on this sphere riding through space all the time, actually. It made you remember that.