great american solar eclipse-anybody here see it?

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hopefully everything is light again.

I was in the path of 93-95% coverage. They were giving out the special glasses at the university that I teach at, so I nabbed a pair to watch the eclipse. Near the apex, the sky darkened slightly (like putting on sunglasses) and the temperature dropped a few degrees. After the apex point, everyone went back to their classes. While heading inside, I showed a few fellow coworkers that you could view the eclipse with the shadow of a hand. It shows up as "nubs" between the fingers of the shadow if you spread your hand apart at the right angle.

did you notice your shadows getting sharper?

I wanted to watch it from Fishing Rock on the Coast. I even drove up there on Friday morning to check out the location. It was a beautiful perfectly clear morning. It would have been perfect viewing conditions for an eclipse. But on Sunday afternoon after looking at all the weather forecast, I abandoned that idea really quick. The only way I could have seen it from the coast would have been from a hilltop above the fog.

So I drove to Madras on Sunday night. No traffic problems at all. I got to Madras about midnight and slept in my car until about 5:30. Then I started driving around looking for a good viewing location. A lot of the roads that I wanted to check were closed because of the fire. I found a nice location on a hilltop by the dam about 7:00. At that time the sky was nice and clear, But between 8:00 and 9:00 it got really smoky and hard to breath. Some people were actually leaving to look for a less smoky location, but I stayed. The smoke cleared a bit by 10:00, to give a pretty good view of the eclipse.

As for what I thought of it. I was kind of surprised that it didn't get darker. I expected to see a lot more stars, but all I saw was Venus and Jupiter. Those would have probably been visible even without the eclipse. Other then that, it was pretty much what I expected. I enjoyed it enough, that I will probably try to see the 2024 eclipse.

After the eclipse all hell broke loose with the traffic. I left right at 10:30. At first traffic was fine until I got closer to town. Near one of those solar event camp grounds, the traffic came to a dead stop. From then on I averaged only 5 mph for the next five hours, until I finally managed to get off US-97. Then everything was OK until I got to I-5. The traffic there was jammed again, but not that bad. Other then the traffic coming back, I was happy with the experience, and I would do it again.

I wish we could have compared notes there.

What notes did you want to compare?

Here are a few pictures I took of the eclipse, and the landscape just before and just after totality.

those are tremendous photos, can you tell me what photo equipment you needed to get those stable and well-focused low-light images? my 18 year old Fuji Finepix was seriously not up to the challenge. I just wanted to see if you saw the crescents in the shadows as well as the sharpened shadow detail pre-totality, as well as the green tinge to the air at that time. also wondering if it got as dark [during totality] in that valley as it did up on the hillside where I was at. do you have any pics of the horizon during totality?

Its just a cheap Samsung WB350F 16.0 MP Digital Camera. Nothing special. I didn't see any crescents, but unfortunately I wasn't looking for them. That's something I will look for during the next eclipse. I don't think I saw a green tinge. I think it was more brown. But that could have been because of the smoke. It got pretty dark in the canyon. A lot darker then the picture shows, but it was still light enough to see everything. The sky was just dark blue. The horizon was lighter. I took the one picture of the hillside right at the start of totality. Then I took the two eclipse pictures. Then I stopped taking pictures and just watched. I hope that answers your questions.