Well ,as pretty much everyone knows, today was a historic Solar Eclipse that passed over us, with the United States in the direct line from coast to coast. I learned some pretty cool stuff about the eclipse and some history about the last one as I perused Facebook today. See, Facebook is useful sometimes. 🙂
We had our special viewing sunglasses all ready (from the Library) and I even thought ahead and moved my afternoon lesson a couple minutes early so we could all go out and view it for a couple of minutes… only to have thick rain clouds obstruct our view entirely.
What a disappointment.
We did watch it on the computer live through the NASA website, but it just wasn’t the same as looking up into the sky and seeing it. Oh, well. There are enough photos (on Facebook!) to curb my curiosity of what it looked like. My favorite photo/video of the day was the view from the NASA space shuttle. It showed the dark shadow of the moon passing over the US. It was cool.
So, now onto the rest of our week. And it’s party week here! Chloe’s Birthday party is scheduled for Saturday, so we have a lot of planning and crafting ahead of us this week! Whoo hoo! (We decided to have her party early this year because of Grandma Patsy’s wedding the first week of September and then school starts and then we have Levi’s first Birthday party the 3rd week in September… so earlier was better!)
Before I go, how about a picture? (Tim already posted this on Facebook, but I wanted to put it here so I can remember it!)
You were pretty far away to see it, but it sure is disappointing that it was cloudy. We had perfect sunny weather, but we did not have the glasses, so we did the old-fashioned thing with the pin-hole camera, projected on the chicken house. It was actually a little underwhelming and we were much closer to the path of totality – we were supposedly at 96% totality, but it didn’t get really dark. Still, it was interesting. I was watching the NASA channel, too, but outside for the time between 2:10 and 2:45, when it passed here.
It was raining here, so we didn’t see it either.
I learned that there is a lot of light that shines when only 1% of the sun is showing. We had about 99% coverage in Spring Hill and it felt very strange to have everything get dimmer and dimmer. Our street lights came on, but it never got very dark. A few miles north, where Nathan works, it was completely dark! Because of the total eclipse being visible in the Nashville area, Nathan got stuck in traffic on the way home. All the people that came to see the eclipse from out of town where driving home.