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BEFORE
TOTALITY |
LOOK
FOR |
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61
minutes |
First
contact - The Moon begins to cover the Sun. Over the next 15 minutes the blue sky becomes
a bit duller, and the landscape begins to look "metallic" as it enters a
twilight state.
|
|
15
minutes |
The
western sky is darker than the eastern sky, and color is turning to violet. Spaces between
leaves in trees act as pinhole cameras to make hundreds of little crescents under the
trees.
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5 minutes |
A dark
storm-looking form is building in the west, but with no sounds. The dark form moves upward
until an orange twilight is revealed beneath it. You are looking underneath the Moon's
shadow as it approaches at close to 1000 miles per hour.
|
|
2
minutes |
The Sun
looks like a blazing silver-white crescent. On the ground the rapid flickering of the
shadow-bands can be seen. These are the result of the sparkling of the crescent Sun in the
lower turbulence of the atmosphere. They shimmer at an ever more rapid pace as totality
approaches, as the turbulence from the upper atmosphere begins to participate. They
resemble the shadows of a huge flock of butterflies flying in formation in front of the
Sun.
|
|
A few seconds |
The
crescent Sun breaks into a curving string of shiny dots called "Bailey's Beads."
These are the last rays of sunlight shining along the bottoms of the deepest valleys of
the Moon. The dots flicker on and off and change position by the half-second as different
valleys move into position finally covering the Sun.
|
|
1 second before |
Only one
shining dot remains - the "diamond ring" effect - as the Sun vanishes in the
middle of the day. Animals have been making twilight sounds and at this point, go to
sleep, sometimes right where they stand. Nocturnal animals come alive. Every reaction in
nature says that it is now nighttime, and the whole world around you starts to rapidly
cool down - sometimes by as much as 20 degrees or more.
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|
Totality |
At our Eclipse Base this lasts 2 minutes,
9 seconds. Where the Sun once shined in the sky,
there is a black disc - the Moon - covering the Sun completely. You are engulfed in
darkness but there is a golden glow all around the horizon. Surrounding the dark Moon is
the Sun's corona, observable only during a total solar eclipse. It is a shimmering
opal-satin with streamers flowing outward, and resembles the white of a huge eye with the
Moon appearing as the eyeball in the middle. It is the outer atmosphere of the Sun shining
at over a million degrees! Scarlet prominences - giant clouds of gas many times the size
of the entire Earth - can be seen swirling out from the edge of the Sun, twisting and
looping off the surface at thousands of miles per hour.
The temperature will continue to drop as an extreme quiet pervades the atmosphere, as if a sub-conscious noise one had heard constantly had suddenly
been turned off. You are standing in the shadow of the Moon.
Among many other things, this direct fit
has allowed us to test the Theory of Relativity upon which our whole idea of the universe
is built. Yet the Moon has not always exactly fit over the Sun. This is a recent
phenomenon because the Moon has been moving away from the Earth at about one inch per
year. This exact fit has only taken place during the last few ten-thousand years, and in
another few ten-thousand years the Moon will no longer be able to completely cover the Sun
and the last total eclipse possible will have gone. In the history of species on the Earth
we live in a privileged age.
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AFTER TOTALITY |
LOOK
FOR |
|
1 to 120 seconds |
Looking
up at the Moon, there seems to be a tiny explosion at one point, but at an incredibly
rapid rate it grows to engulf you! It is the diamond ring effect in reverse. Shadow bands
shimmer all around you on the ground. The stars and planets blink out. You are surrounded
by an explosion of light. The world, like a tremendously huge machine, begins to start-up
again. Looking to the east the shadow of
the Moon can be seen racing off at about 1000 miles per hour across the hills and over the
horizon. The shadow bands slow in their shimmering and then fade. The animals start to get
up; some making morning sounds, and the warmth of the sunshine and bustle of life on Earth
is back.
You have been one of the privileged few people to ever
experience a few moments in the shadow of the Moon, and to have seen the Sun's atmosphere.
It is an awe-inspiring demonstration of the precision of the Earth's and Moon's orbits
that cannot be influenced in any way by all of humankind's technology. You have connected
with the universe today, and we guarantee that you will never be the same again. But be
warned, the very next words after "Wow!" are almost always "When and where
is the next one?" |
