Preparation
Back in 2017, my mother was able to view the total eclipse. At that time, she passed along a few tidbits to me:
- it's worth seeing "in totality" at least once during your lifetime
- it's nice to see it "with others," meaning in a place like a park or town square, to enjoy the event semi-socially
So, back in 2017, my wife and I kind of decided, "Next time, we're doing it."
The next time was April 8, 2024 and we decided to do it. A few months ago was time to finalize an answer to the question, "We said we'd do it. Are we really gonna do this or not?" I'm stubborn enough to, "Stick to the plan," which is another lesson my mother taught me from years of backpacking (she's hiked the entire Appalachian Trail). "We're going to do it," I resolved.
I took off days from work. My wife booked an AirBnB in a locale within "striking distance" to the centerline. The idea was to set up a base camp close, yet not too close to get mixed into the fervor of eclipse-goers and prices running up. I researched a location to view the eclipse that I thought might work, maybe, I dunno, never done this and we had a plan forming.
Source: https://nso.edu/for-public/eclipse-map-2024/
Not sure why exactly, but Poplar Bluff, Missouri caught my eye. Particularly, a lake north of town caught my eye because the centerline bisected the lake. That seemed like a nice place to set up.
Google streetview showed a nice park on the lake (with potties...a crucial detail after hours of travel).
So, that was the target: Eagle Point Recreation Area at https://www.google.com/maps/place/Eagle+Point+Recreation+Area/@36.937443,-90.2828519,16z/data=!4m6!3m5!1s0x87d7c03e7df29cfb:0x654cf13d3ec653ec!8m2!3d36.9373229!4d-90.278732!16s%2Fg%2F1tgzbwxf?authuser=0&entry=ttu
The plan was forming.
Base camp
We went to our "base camp" on Saturday. With check in at 3pm, we had most of the day to toodle around. We went for a somewhat long bicycle ride...beautiful but I got a bit pooped out. A good wood-fired pizza at the end helped out a lot.
My wife is pretty good at finding nice places to stay. For about the "price of a hotel room," we stayed here:
Sunday was gorgeous and we had all day to just laze around. We took a hike and took it easy. A hot dog (or anything) cooked over a campfire always, always tastes better.
April 8, 2024
When the alarm went off in the morning, it was "go time" as I shot out here. It was raining, that's bad.
The rain subsided (as forecasted), the sun came out, and travel was good. Until...44 miles away...we had to take a potty stop. A gas station in the middle of Missouri farmland was the only option. We stopped, then noticed the continual line of traffic flowing along the two lane road. It was non-stop. Evidently, many others needed a potty break too...that poor gas station restroom had a revolving door. Strangely, the women's restroom had only a 1-person wait. The men's restroom had about a 5-person wait. Is this reverse-of-nature another side effect of a total eclipse?
Back outside, watching the traffic flow along that road, we worried for the first time. We worried that we might have come this far only to get stymied this close to our destination.
We'd kind of expected the whole thing to be a bit of an adventure, and it was beginning to be that. Fortunately, back on the road, I think most of the crowd was actually going to Poplar Bluff. We were not...we were going to the lake north of town. The GPS routed us off the two-lane onto an even narrower two-lane. No one else came our way. It did seem like we were the only fools going the wrong direction. We were even routed onto a literal gravel road! "Are you sure we're going the right direction?" was asked.
The GPS routing was in fact correct, and we did in fact make it. Next question, "Will there be a place to park?" It was 30 minutes before the eclipse was to start. The place was full...cars/trucks/campers, people walking around, sitting, picnicking. They were obviously earlier and readier. We drove through the parking lots...full, full, full. We literally got the last space, which wasn't exactly an official parking space, just an open slot at the end of the parking spaces. I don't care, "I'm parking."
Getting parked was an almost instant stress relief. I had a, "Whew, we made it," moment. 28 minutes to spare.
In all this, I learned that "chasing" a total eclipse can be compared/contrasted with going to a big sports or concert event.
Similarities
- You must get yourself to the location and there is traffic!
- There is excitement (and urgency) in the air that can be felt. This especially in the last-minutes potty stop.
Differences
- You don't need to get to a specific location, like a stadium. Going to a stadium means everyone funnels down into a narrow, narrow area. With the eclipse, at least it's a swath (the path of totality) rather than a point. That's helpful.
- Once in the path, you can really watch it anywhere, just stop, look up. That's helpful.
- There is no stopping the timing. If you're late, you missed it. Even with a big game or concert, there's a chance something like the power goes out, or lightning delay, or whatever that stalls its start. With an eclipse, there are no delays. You either get there or you don't. That's not helpful.
Pictures
My goal was to enjoy the moment, to enjoy the eclipse. Totality would last four minutes so I'd determined to not frantically and frustratingly futz with cameras and miss out. Plus, I had no intention of trying to get "professional" pics, that's for the pros.
And yet, if you don't have pictures, it didn't happen, right? My camera plan was lame, but it was to (1) use my phone, (2) use my old phone which is no longer active as a phone but might still work as a camera and I wouldn't care if it got fried, and (3) use my old old digital camera from before when phones even had decent digital cameras. That digital camera also had a small zoom lens, so maybe it'd get some better shots with it.
My picture plan didn't turn out too well.
Somewhere I'd heard or read that you could put the paper/plastic eclipse glasses over your phone camera's lens and take pics that way. The glasses worked great over eyes, seemed okay over the camera, but every pic I took came out like an orange blob. What should have been an orange crescent shape (orange sun with black moon in front), was just a blurry burnt egg yolk.
My intention was to take a photo like this every 10 or 15 minutes, then put them together in my own animated gif to show the change. I took the photos, and despite how they looked through my glasses, they all came out almost exactly the same...orange blob. That was a fail.
I went ahead and made the gif, above, and I guess it does in fact show some change. The "After" pic was immediately, instantly after the sun began to reappear, hence it kind of came out as expected. (I didn't take anymore such photos after that though.) As a note, it did surprise me that as soon as the first of the sun's rays reappeared, you were immediately blinded, looked away, and put your eclipse glasses back on. Just a few rays were all that were needed to light everything back up. Looking through the glasses, there was only a thin, thin sliver of a crescent sun showing, yet it was blinding without eclipse glasses. The difference between a partial and total eclipse is, well, day and night difference.
One thing that did come out okay was my other gif. I wanted to try to show the change in lighting. So, about every 10 or 15 minutes, I snapped a pic of the hillside in our area. Again, I wasn't trying to compete with pros on such time lapse photography, just wanted to do my own thing for the fun of it.
The transition from bright to kind of auburn coloring to evening-dark during totality, then back, came out pretty well. It may not look dramatic, but in the middle of a bright sunny day, that's not the usual.
Regarding the old phone camera, the dang thing wouldn't save. I thought it'd have some memory to save a jpg file, but it wasn't cooperating. Maybe it does work, but I wasn't going to troubleshoot it during the eclipse. (Umm, lack of preparation is evidenced here. Shoulda tested prior. Oops.)
Regarding the old old digital camera, I really don't know what happened. It's a long story, but a couple of things are at play here. (1) It works great, but you can't see hardly anything of what type of photo you're taking. The LCD screen is broken so badly that all that is visible is about the rightmost 10% of the screen. This was due to having the camera in my pocket in Wisconsin one winter at near-zero temps for too long. It froze, it busted the screen. So, now, you must quickly pan the camera to get a general idea of what you're pointing at, pray, snap a pic, then pray something comes out. You can't really check it until you plug it into a computer. And (2) the thing didn't seem to want to even power on at the time of the eclipse. Normally, it powers on, the zoom lens pops out, and it's picture time. It just didn't cooperate. After the old phone fail, I was absolutely not going to waste time with an old old digital camera. I put it away for the duration. (Of course, it worked just fine two days later when I took a look at it. That's what they do.)
During totality
I've heard that a total eclipse is a multi-sensory experience. I now agree.
The visual is obvious.
Regarding the sound, first of all, people cheered when the sun went dark and totality started. (They also cheered when the sun re-emerged.) After the initial cheer at the beginning, they quieted. Someone nearby shot fireworks (we heard them but didn't see them). As far as animals, I didn't notice (I don't hear very well), but my wife did say that birds went silent. Thinking back, I do recall the mockingbirds had been singing out loudly when the sun was out. And, it did seem very peaceful during totality. There were dogs around, but none barked. I asked a couple of dog-people afterwards how their pup reacted, one said "slept the whole time" and the other said the boy dog was focused on a nearby girl dog. Nature does what it does.
Regarding sensation, it got chilly. Before, I'd say it was 80 degrees Fahrenheit. We were hot in the sun. I'll bet the temp dropped into the 60s, maybe only to the low 70s, during totality and I got a slight chill. This was probably because I'd been hot just a few minutes earlier. Thinking back, it was very similar to the time of sunset on a hot day. The difference being that we never go from hottest-part-of-the-day to sunset-cool within a 10 minute span, except during a total eclipse.
Back to the visual, the instant the moons totally obscures the sun you can take off your eclipse glasses. The corona immediately lights up in a ring around the black moon. It's strange to look at the "sun" with the naked eye (of course, you're not looking at the sun, you're looking at the unlit moon and the sun's corona behind it).
Maybe the most disappointing thing for me was that my "totality" picture failed. I guess the corona, though you could look at it no problem with naked eyes, was still too bright for my phone camera or my phone didn't know what to do with it. My resulting image had a bluish sky (the sky was actually black) and a filled-in "solid" sun/moon. The image was nothing like what I saw.
Though disappointing photo-wise, totality was terrific. We've all seen photos and videos of total eclipses, but looking at it, "Right up there in the sky," with one's own eyes is just different.
One thing did pan out great...at the last minute before leaving home, on a whim, I grabbed my binoculars. I wasn't sure if they'd be handy in an eclipse, but I packed them along. They were great during totality. The sun/moon/corona was about "full moon-size" to the naked eye during totality. At the bottom of the moon an orange "ember" was visible to the naked eye. (I drew a spot on my illustration above.) But viewed through the binoculars, it was huge and the detail was amazing. All around the ring that was the moon were tons of orange embers. That "small" one (probably far, far bigger than the earth) was just the largest of many. I don't have a photo, but I have a memory.
Totality looked like sunset or sunrise.
What was different, though, was that it was 360 degrees. We're used to sunrise in the east or sunset in the west looking like the pics above, but I can say I've literally never seen it 360 degrees though until April 8, 2024. It makes sense though...we were in the middle of a dark spot, there was light all around the outside, like light just over the horizon after the sun drops in the evening. So, it's a 360 degree sunset/sunrise. This caught me unexpected a bit (again, lack of prep here), else I would've tried a panoramic pic. Oh well, again, I had four minutes and I wanted to enjoy the time.
And oh, visible...the stars come out!
Back
After the eclipse, people started trickling away. We packed up, went for a short walk, and wound up staying all the way until the moon had passed. It was beautiful there and we would have loved to linger, but we had a pretty good drive ahead of us again.
Although getting there was rather easy (except for the panicky potty stop), we hit traffic I believe three times on the return.
The worse was on another two-lane road in Missouri. I first got a bit nervous about it when I saw a local was parked at the end of his driveway, sitting in the back of his pickup truck, livestreaming all the eclipse tourists going down his road. I believe Google Maps was routing everyone along this nameless backroad as a "shortcut," which it may be on paper. However, I don't think Maps accounts for eclipses. The left turn onto the main highway got log jammed as people waited for a break to turn left. It took quite a while to go about two miles.
That night we got back to the little cabin and slept great.
The next day, Tuesday, was an even longer drive back home. When we finally got home, about midnight Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, we were tired. I had to get ready for work in a few hours. But, when I shut off the vehicle, my wife and I looked at each other and I said, "We did it." She agreed.
The whole endeavor was a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of effort. Since being home, reactions from others have been interesting. One woman asked all about it and was almost kicking herself for not going. "I'll be 84 years old when the next one comes!" she said. A co-worker asked me about it and I said it was great, but a listening-in secretary seemed unimpressed. I mentioned how clear and detailed it was looking at it with binoculars and she said, "But you're not supposed to look at it!" I answered simply, "You can look at it during totality, even with naked eyes or binoculars." I saw a little light bulb flicker in her head...she just didn't get it. She was thinking partial eclipse and she's right...don't look at it with your eyes or certainly not with binoculars! But a total eclipse is different. I still don't think she got it, but a tiny flicker, like that ember on the bottom of the corona ring, flickered in her brain.
The most common question I got was, "Was it worth it?" Yes, it was. After getting home from work on Wednesday, I asked my wife, "Ready to go for the next eclipse?" She answered, "Yes! Let's go!"
I spoke to some young people during the week who were asking about our trip. I mentioned that if there's a lesson in all this, the lesson is:
- Set a goal
- Make a plan
- Work the plan
- It doesn't always yield success, but you have a good chance
We're on the clock.
I go by
or "CR" for short. See all my links or contact info at https://linktr.ee/crrdlx.