Comment by echelon
1 day ago
Partial and annular solar eclipses are interesting.
Total solar eclipses are magical.
The sun turns into a gleaming jewel and all of nature around you enters another dimension. The animals freak out, the temperature of the air around you drops dramatically, your shadows morph and multiply into weird shapes, it feels like midnight with an ethereal glow.
You see the atmosphere of the sun glow in all chromatic glory.
You'll never witness anything else like it.
Just to add onto the strange observations to encourage more people to go:
- I saw a child start laughing uncontrollably at 99.9% and then go completely silent and literally fall over at 100%
- A grown woman began sobbing
Occurred to me that we humans are among those animals that "start acting strangely" when this event occurs. Even when we know what's happening!
For me personally, it was the first and only time in my life that I felt, in a spatial awareness sense, that I was on a rock flying through space. The immensity, scale, anciency, and inevitability of the whole system just really hit me in the face in a way that is impossible to describe.
The drop in temperature was the most striking part for me. It wasn't just dark, it was night in the middle of the day for a couple of minutes.
I found the sudden quietness quite a lot more interesting. It was really weird, not like nighttime where you glide into it but sudden like someone flipped a switch and it was done.
It made me think of a movie effect where they do a quick whoosh type of fade to silence rather than just cut as the totality came on. It was one of the most memorable moments of it to me.