Eclipse 2017

It is interesting that I had a vague idea what the eclipse was all about, and what I knew (which was not much), I just thought was not all that much to get excited about.  How wrong I was, and am very glad that my husband John was insistent that we get back to Farmington Mo. to view it.  It turns out he was right, it was a wonderful experience not to be missed!
Hearing stories about what was seen of the eclipse, from partial to total, I must say we had one of the best spots in all of the 2,600 miles of its path.  In some areas it rained or was cloudy, other places the totality did not last that long.  We viewed it from our niece Miriam's backyard outside of Farmington.

The picture is looking to the south and toward the hills of the Ozarks.

So my one brilliant idea was to get before and after pictures.

Monday, or moon days s it became known, was a bright sunny day with very few clouds.  Around 11:30 AM we started watching the sun with our special glasses.  We could see that slowly the moon was covering the sun, like taking big bites out of it.  And the sun eventually disappeared.

Now my photography skills for this were quite bad, to say the least.  I was using my glasses to cover the lens of my camera, all the time trying not to look up into the sky toward at what my camera was pointed to.  My camera had the glasses and my eyes were unprotected.  Just made for a bit of a clumsiness with my hands and some pretty bad pictures.  I should have zoomed in more when the full eclipse happened, the picture below is blurry and not all of the eclipse is visible.

There is a blackness in the center of the picture above.  Anyway when the eclipse was totally present there was a beautiful light around the moon, which was the corona of the sun.  For me that was the most beautiful part of the eclipse.  It was great to take off the glasses at this point.  Darkness fell, the same picture above in the bright sunlight is shown again below.

Darkness fell, the crickets started in with their usual nightly noise, and all to soon the world abruptly changed.  Twilight, sunrise, whatever, began.  Looking in a full circle around me daylight was beginning again.

Just to see something in nature so out of the ordinary was fantastic- equally interesting was to see how everything else in nature, as the birds and crickets, responded by doing what they do normally.
And we also felt the temperature drop, our very warm day became cooler- at least for a couple of hours.
Friday we will begin our journey south to Florida.  We do seem to pack on the miles!