It’s nearly 9 PM and I’m watching a line of cars headed down 12 South into Montpelier, #Vermont. I typically see about a car a minute or so. Amazing the number of people that shared this celestial event together. #Eclipse#Eclipse2024
I looked into the heart of the sun. I saw a 360 degree sunset. I saw the mountains of the moon. I saw stars during the day and Venus shining beside the sun and the moon.
A few moments before totality everything got still. The mourning doves and insects went quiet. The light wasn’t like a sunset, it didn’t have that angle to it. It was just grey and ghostly. The high clouds made the light very white and grey, making you feel like you were in a shadow world. #Eclipse#Vermont#Eclipse2024 1/2
I can barely explain what I experienced during totality. It was far more emotional that I realized to stand in the shadow of the moon and stare up like that, looking at the sun. I wandered around in a daze, looking at everything.
Afterwards I felt hungover, confused. I still do.
I’ve read about how people say total solar eclipses are life altering. I never knew why.
My only good shot from totality (after I remembered to take the filter off the lens! 🤦♂️🤣). Totality was amazing and so I was drinking it all in. Temps dropped a good 10 degrees F, mosquitoes came out, the birds stopped singing, everyone’s solar lights came on, and it was incredibly dark. Really amazing!
And then it was over and everything started returning to normal!
Happy #eclipse day for all those who observe. I am not in the #totality path here in #Nashville, but the youngest daughter in #Vermont is, with a front row seat. And 7 years ago I was one of you and I took my own photo as a keepsake.
I am amused by the suggestions from Vermont state agencies that people should bring a paper map in case GPS stops working. After 17 years with smartphones and Google/Apple Maps… ** do people even know how to read paper maps anymore? ** 🤣
Waking up to bright blue skies in Vermont for Eclipse Day! Hoping they will stay that way… although current forecasts call for high, translucent clouds to come in during the early afternoon. (Which still should be okay for eclipse viewing.) The fun begins around 2:20pm, with totality at 3:26, and then it all ending by 4:30-ish.
It is 6:17 AM and there is already a stream of traffic heading north. I am just thankful that we didn’t do anything stupid yesterday and that the dog is not stressing out like he has in the past.
We are about 30 minutes south of Burlington in the middle of nowhere farm country and this is the traffic ahead of us. In the past half hour we’ve gone from an hour and 15 minutes to our destination to one hour to our destination. We keep passing through teeny town centers where the speed limit drops, and it ends up making slow moving standing waves of traffic
There are, apparently a lot of really impatient assholes on the road. Be careful out there, folks.
One of them that nearly forced us off the road by not allowing us to merge when a lane went away just tried to pull around a semi, on the blind side of the hill, in a no passing zone when the truck is also in the same long line of traffic that we are.
It was… dramatic. I have thoughts. The first of which is that 3 1/2 minutes is not nearly long enough to wrap your head around everything that’s happening.
We left the house before dawn so my hat had not come out yet. But I am photophobic, and when we got out of the car, the world was far too bright. Eventually vendors arrived, and I discovered that one of them had a hat.
This is officially the stupidest and ugliest fitting hat I own. In its defense, it protected my eyes for multiple hours, and was worth every overpriced penny to me.
Today’s mission is simple: figure out where the sun will be in the sky starting around 3:00pm-ish so that we can plan where best to watch tomorrow’s big event! (Without actually leaving our neighborhood 🙂)
Should I Stay (In) or Should I Go (Out) Now? The Vermont Eclipse Dilemma - what happens when you have 10s or 100s of thousands of people driving to an area where the roads are more meant for maybe hundreds of vehicles??