Our first total solar eclipse experience was in Aug 2017, Prior to that, I have always wanted to view one and never got an opportunity. I had viewed a couple of partial solar eclpises but never got a chance to view totality. In 2017, that changed. I had planned a year ahead, booked a hotel and got a chance to view totality after a last minute panic because of marine layer over Newport Beach Oregon. That experience was surreal. It’s hard to explain in words so I won’t even attempt to do that. Needless to say, we planned ahead for the great eclipse of 2024. We traveled to what we thought would be an ideal place to watch the eclipse from – Austin, TX. We stayed at my buddy’s place whose amazing photography skills you can see below. Even though the totality was for a shorter duration here, we figured we could travel an hour away to get into the maximum totality.
We had booked our tickets to Austin more than 8 months in advance . We had planned it to be a week long vacation so that we could spend some time with my friends family and explore Austin as well. However, couple of days before travel, we shortened our trip as our daughter was recovering from a cold so we ended up going there for 4 days as opposed to 7. As we all now know, the weather forecast across texas was really bad and we had resigned to the fact that we may not be able to view the eclipse at all. Also, based on our past experience of 12 hour driving time back to Seattle area after viewing the eclipse in Newport beach, we decided it was not worth it to drive anywhere with two young kids for an eclipse that we may not be able to view because of the weather.
On the night before the eclipse the weather reports were all ominous saying that Ausin would have close to 87% cloud cover at the time of totality. Assuming the worst, we just decided to stay home and check out the eclipse if we were lucky at all. On the day off, it looked like we might not be able to see anything. The sun was behind the clouds most of the day, peeking out once in a while for a moment or two. Since we traveled all the way to Austin from PNW, we decided to go to a nearby park to atleast enjoy the atmosphere of the eclipse if not for the eclipse itself. We headed to a nearby park a little bit beofre totality and waited.
Amazingly, few minutes before totality, the clouds started clearing out and we were treated to a wonderful total solar eclipse! Although there were clouds rolling in an out as you can see in the first picture, it did not take away from the amazing experience.
When people tell me that they saw a 80% or 90% solar eclpise, to stress the magic of totality, I tell them,only half jokingly, that 0% totality is same as 99% totality for a solar eclipse. As you can probably tell, we are enamoured by this phenomenon and we hope to travel, when feasible, to wherever and whenver it occurs! We may be becoming some of those eclipse chasers you hear about in the media 🙂
Here is another:
astropilotdad.com 