Surprising it didn't get darker with only that thin sliver of sun showing (98.6%). Guess I should have made the hour drive south to Lincoln, NE.
NSS. Some of us tried to make that point in the first couple pages of this thread.
We were briefly on the Weather Channel at 5:05PM and 9:05PM yesterday. They al
so filmed our weeding and say we will get a copy of that along with the interview. We were also interviewed by several local media people from Jackson, including someone from Outside Magazine who had previous written about skim websites including mine.
As I said elsewhere, congratulations to Tony and Liz on their marriage. Sorry I did not make it to Jackson Hole for the eclipse with you two, but my wife and I thought we could get to totality with her only taking one day off. We did and even got home in time to see the 9:05 PM showing although were probably still unloading, but spending another night in central OR would have been nice.
We watched the eclipse from about 5 miles N of Prineville, OR where we had about 1 min 30 secs of totality and got to see the sun's corona and planets shining in the dark sky in mid-morning, then saw an incredible diamond ring when totality was ending. We'd planned to go further N to get more totality, but saw smoke in that area before sunrise so we joined small group in dirt lot next to unoccupied cattle pens who had scouted the previous weekend and said it was the best spot they found. Only the first three cars on left were there when we arrived. They even brought a porta-potty in a tent and not only did we leave no trace, we picked up some garbage that was there.
All four of us who drove from CA to OR for eclipse are planning to either be in Mexico or Texas in 2024.
Note how bright the field across road is about an hour before the eclipse started.
Same field is a lot darker even though iPhone is trying to compensate. This is very close to start of totality and light is crashing.
Picture we received from my cousin who drove from Orlando to Clemson, SC when his original planned spot was cloudy. We received while driving NE of Bend where most of the cows were laying down even though sun was only about 50% eclipsed. On our way there, in a line a 15-20 cars going 50+ mph, we had a coyote cross the road less than 50' in front of us.
Not everyone was exited by the eclipse. Leche did not get out of the back of my SUV much. If there were squirrels..
Drive back to CA was shorter than drive to OR. Very short delay at stoplight (that delayed us for at least 30 min on way N) in LaPine, OR that we mostly avoided. Then we took frontage roads from halfway between Weed and Mt. Shasta City as Caltrans thought it was a good day to shutdown a lane of I-5 for paving and then had on-ramp we planned to use to get back on closed. So we had this view with our jalapeno burger and garlic fries that we stopped for when alternate route included street closed for Farmer's Market.