I drove out to my mom’s condo today, because for some bizarre reason, her home is about 3 yards of the line 0f totality. The line of totality is about 100 miles wide, but there is a singular line which may be called something more than totality. It’s a line, even down to the yards, where the moon will actually be in the exact center of the sun. that means a perfect circle within a circle — not off to north south east or west. It should create the greatest view of the sun.
The most surprising thing to me, was that you have to take off the protective goggles and look at the sun directly. The second surprise was that it isn’t just a black circle like the photos generally show. (Even the great one I copied for this entry.) It’s more like a star sapphire but more diamond like than that gemstone.
In this eclipse we saw a bit of red at the 5:00 angle and some people said, “Oh that’s a solar flair,” but it’s not. It’s a solar prominence. A kind of mountain of plasma and in the one photographed above, 3 earths could fit into that space: a mountain that is at least 45,000 miles high. To compare, Everest is 5 miles high.
But then of course the religious people have to ruin it. Idiots like Marjorie Taylor Greene and my own cleaning woman. The latter texted me and said, “Did you know the first new light after the eclipse is going to land on Israel? I wanted to text back and say, “No, it will land on me and all the people watching with me,” and then add, “plus it never stopped shining on people who weren’t in the direct path.
The other one — the insane politician — tried to explain it to us that it is God’s sign we’d better shape up. “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You.”
Finally, even though the eclipse lasted for more than 4 minutes, it was over in a flash and watching some of the possibly fake animations of the shadow crossing over America, it really does drive home how far away the moon is, and how rarely it casts its shadow on the earth.