I just love that word “totality”. And the phrase “achieving totality”. It sounds like the completion of some ultimate spiritual quest, when really it is just the moon getting fully in the way.
There’s a word for when this alignment occurs: “syzygy” – the straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies in a gravitational system. Astronomers make up the best words. You want to scream out “buy a vowel!” but there are already as many vowels as consonants in the word. Ha. I bet the Scrabble players among us already knew that word.
So, totality comes from syzygy.
Anyway – I have seen a few partial eclipses over the years, but seeing the total eclipse was significantly different. I can understand the importance that ancients placed upon total eclipses. Even though I know about how it happens, removing the mystery, it is still awesome, and it helps me to think of myself as a speck in the universe. That’s a good thing, to think that.
I had the luxury of living nearby for this one. Listening to predictions about overcrowded highways, I woke up very early and left my place in Portland for Salem at 3:30 am. No problems at all getting down there, only 50 miles or so, maybe an hour. I could have slept in a bit, but you never know about these things. I went first to a 24-hour McDonald’s, then to a nice riverfront park and sports venue in West Salem.
There were tents on the edges of all the sports fields, and in all the non-field open spaces. The park management had put out the nicest signs, basically saying “feel free to tent here, we’ve put up extra toilets, but please stay away from the grass in the middle of the sports fields which we try hard to keep in shape for the athletes”. And, people obeyed – it was nice to see.
This part of Salem has a riverfront park that is on both sides of the river, connected to one another by a pedestrian bridge converted from an old railroad bridge. I had a lot of time, so I hiked around before settling on a beach to await totality.
Here are a few pics of the park and of people getting ready.
What’s the adage about sleeping dogs? Oh yeah, I remember…
Here’s the old railroad bridge over the Willamette River, now a pedestrian bridge.
A view of the early morning quiet Willamette, looking north from the bridge.
We waited and waited and then finally we saw the first edges of the moon getting in the way. So people started clicking away and changing filters on their cameras, fishing out their special sunglasses, and basically becoming more quiet as our attention was now focused.
I tried a few things. The first was the old pinhole projection technique, and it worked pretty well. Here’s a snapshot of the image part way through the partial part of the eclipse.
I also tried taking pictures with my phone camera directly at the partial eclipse as it was happening. I tried many settings. This one is with the HDR (high dynamic range) turned on. Usually the HDR takes a few images and merges them into one – each image being an adjustment in gain, and the merge being the best possible. Obviously that’s a simplification. Looking right at the eclipse with the camera, the HDR got a touch confused, and just overlayed images. At least that’s what I think happened. So you can see the big bright sun, the halo, but also if you look closely you’ll see another image, that being similar to the pinhole projection. That other image mapped its percentage coverage to the pinhole projections as we made progress, which made me reasonably sure it wasn’t a revealed planet or something else.
Finally totality arrived. There were whoops and hollers all about, quite fun. It got dark very quickly. It also got chilly very quickly. This next pic is boring, and isn’t what we were seeing. We were seeing a dark center, and a ring of light around that center, and a halo further out from that bright ring. Then, when totality ended, a bright shot of light came from one edge of what we were looking at, as if a piece of the sun had exploded away from the center. After that, it was a reverse process to the lead-up to totality.
Here’s a pic of our little beach during totality. The camera did its best to make light of a nighttime shot, but you can see street lights on the bridge that came on automatically, and the waterway channel and bridge warning lights looking very bright. It really was dark for a couple of minutes.
Well, that’s it! We all got in our vehicles and headed home. As it turns out, I would have been better off bicycling. The 50 mile return trip from Salem to Portland took more than 4 hours. I learned later from several friends who had made the same trip, that no routes were good. Even the old-timers who knew all the back roads were stymied. Oh well. I would do it again.
Would I travel a long way to see another? Maybe, especially if the destination had some other redeeming virtue. There’s going to be another in the U.S. in about 7 years I think, and this next one is on a north-south line rather than the approximate east-west line of the one we just had. I might go for it.