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Solar Eclipse 2017 Discussion Thread

MadPatSki

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I'm not sure if an announcement has been made here, but there was an announcement on Facebook along with pictures of the wedding ceremony.
Only Tony Crocker and Liz could eclipse the eclipse.
:toast
There are photos, but I'll let them post when they're ready.
*There is even a rumor that the Weather Channel picked up the story and filmed it.

I saw a few pictures of them tagged on FB.

Congrats again @TonyC and @Lizardqueen.

Here is something in honour of Liz and Tony!!! Something different than that damn Boonie Tyler song. :doh:


Congrats on your Total Awesome Event!!! The only thing that would top that would have been by adding some skiing during the eclipse. :yahoo::daffy:
 

MadPatSki

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Here is what it looked like from Ottawa.

Traffic jam heading on the edge of Aviation Museum. Snails' pace to enter the overflowing Museum parking. This is where I dropped of my daughter and turned around to park at the RCMP stables.

IMG_6382.JPG


Another line up. A few people had set up some telescopes for the public to see. Needed to say, they were no more of the free 1000+ eclipse glasses, however people shared them.


IMG_6384.JPG


Must. Not. Look. At. The. Sun. !!!

(PS. My eyes are closed, the eclipse had started, but doesn't show at all in this selfie of my regular sun glasses.

IMG_6386.JPG


Taken by my daughter through the lenses of the telescope we waited for. Could have hardly have timed the long line up better. This was about 8 minutes from maximum.

21057307_1688715917814714_1340486001_o.jpg
 

Mothertucker

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So, out of everyone who will be in the totality zone, what percentage will be buck nekkid doin' it??
We drove north out of Star Valley, WY to meet with friends up on Teton Pass, but realized we would be too late, so we stopped at a scenic pullout on the Snake River to observe. I do not know about percentages, but there was nudity, and although I have no proof, I do have a witness.:yahoo: The experience of totality (eclipse, not the nudity) was absolutely phenomenal, well worth the effort, and the cold water! Congratulations to @TonyC and @Lizardqueen , glad the weather was cooperative for the big event. I saw the sun set twice today.
IMG_20170821_121442.jpg
 
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Snowfan

aka Eric Nelson
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IT WAS AWESOME. 100% for 2:37. We were across the street from the Stuhr Museum in Grande Island, NE. Thousands of friendly people with telescopes and gadgets. As the eclipse went on for 15 minutes or so the temp dropped a good 10-15 degrees. Clear sky under sun with thin cloudcover around. Words and pictures do not do it justice.
This is my niece Chloe taking a look....(LOL, after taking a look!)
20170821_110951[1].jpg

The light dimmed to a never seen before intensity and odd warmth, then...poof. Lights out.
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Dang cameras adjust to low light and make it look lighter. We could see planets and a few stars. The entire horizon all 360 degrees looked red like sunset.

20170821_125941[1].jpg
 

scott43

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A bit less in Ottawa, but there were still a gazillions people at the Aviation & Space Museum in Ottawa. I had one remaining Eclipse glasses at home which I drove off for my wife at work before heading to the museum with my daughters. So much less people at the Montreal Planetarium back in 1994.

Apparently we're getting a direct hit in 2024. So we got THAT to look foward to.. ogsmile
 

TonyC

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We were briefly on the Weather Channel at 5:05PM and 9:05PM yesterday. They also 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.
 

RachelV

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Congrats Tony!

We ended up about halfway between the bottom of the path and the center of the path near Binford, WY. The park service had rangers out at the entrance to the dispersed camping areas with maps, helping people get where they needed to go. They guessed there were "a few thousand people" in the forest service land up there, but it didn't feel crowded where we ended up camping. We watched the eclipse with a handful of campers who were nearby, and a few private landowners from the immediate area.

That area is SUCH a hodgepodge of forest service, BLM and private land. We actually got kicked out of one campsite by a landowner, and then almost got kicked out of a second when a landowner and a park ranger with a GPS unit had a disagreement about where the public land stopped and the private land started. :) Everyone was really cool about everything, though. The landowners mostly seemed concerned about liability (there were free range buffalo up there), and not the fact that people had accidentally set up on what might be private land for one night.

Traffic on the way up on Sunday was no problem, and traffic coming back down 25 on Monday was, as I thought it would be, pretty terrible. Probably took us 6 hours to get back down to Boulder, and it'd normally be a ~3.5 hour drive.

The total eclipse was pretty unreal, though. 100% worth the effort. The weird light, the dropping temperatures, the 360* sunrise & sunset, and the sci-fi looking corona were all pretty surreal to experience in person.

IMG_4743.JPG
 

Tony

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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 also 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.

4892WhereWeSawItFrom.JPG


Note how bright the field across road is about an hour before the eclipse started.
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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.
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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.
4898EclipseByJoe.JPG


Not everyone was exited by the eclipse. Leche did not get out of the back of my SUV much. If there were squirrels..
4899LecheElipseGlasses.JPG


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.
4895MtShastaCity.JPG
 

Tricia

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A friend on Facebook took his son from Denver to Casper to experience totality:
This is his video of his return.
Exodus from Totality
 

Snowfan

aka Eric Nelson
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The moon/sun looked like this and the sky not quite so dark....
images.duckduckgo.com.jpg


I was not interested 10 days prior to the eclipse but I saw something in TonyC's posts and it kind of grew on me. I hope to get to all I can in the future. The experience was rich. No doubt the fact that it was not man-made had something to do with it. Really a special feel to the whole thing. 1000 mile round trip and worth every mile.

My wife and niece were completely blown away. We had a blast.
 

Dadskier

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I haven't read this whole thread yet, but has anyone noted that the next eclipse is on April 8 2024 right over most of NE ski country? Assuming it's an average winter there will be several ski areas open at that time. Who wants to meet up at Sugarloaf for eclipse skiing?
 

Tricia

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I haven't read this whole thread yet, but has anyone noted that the next eclipse is on April 8 2024 right over most of NE ski country? Assuming it's an average winter there will be several ski areas open at that time. Who wants to meet up at Sugarloaf for eclipse skiing?
That could be pretty incredible.
Needless to say, in 2045, Phil and I will be in a pretty amazing seat.

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Tricia

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The moon/sun looked like this and the sky not quite so dark....
View attachment 28336

I was not interested 10 days prior to the eclipse but I saw something in TonyC's posts and it kind of grew on me. I hope to get to all I can in the future. The experience was rich. No doubt the fact that it was not man-made had something to do with it. Really a special feel to the whole thing. 1000 mile round trip and worth every mile.

My wife and niece were completely blown away. We had a blast.
I was always interested in the eclipse, and even though we didn't take the trip to the path of totality, we enjoyed the experience very much.
There are a few things in life that I hope to never take for granted, stunning views of Lake Tahoe from a mountain top is one. The Eclipse is another.
I was in a 83-ish percent path, but it was an awesome 83%.
Thank you for sharing your images of this awesome experience.
 

SpikeDog

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The weather came through for me, and I had clear skies over White Pine Ski Area near Pinedale. My family and I watched from near the top chairlift. That photo by RachelV really captured the 360 degree rainbow sunset that I thought was the coolest feature of the total eclipse. It really got cold, and we could see the shadow encroaching from the northwest along the Wind River Range about 20 seconds before we were under it. I took 4 photos that didn't capture anything cool, and it didn't get as dark as advertised. I only saw one star (probably a planet anyway).

We left Rock Springs at 8:45 AM, tucked into a rolling caravan. At least everyone was trying to keep up with the speed limit. It was looking like a solid line of cars heading north, but almost everyone turned off at Farson to head towards Lander & Riverton. We were in normal traffic all the way to Pinedale. I expected a couple of thousand cars at White Pine, but there were only a hundred or so. They had the chairlift running extra slow, so instead of the usual 12 minutes it took a half hour. We had the bar down so we didn't fall out due to falling asleep.

While the eclipse was about halfway done, work called and said the glasses they provided the entire company were fakes and not to use them. I felt like a Space Marine in Aliens who was told to hand over all their ammo before entering the alien hive. Luckily, I had some glasses I bought in Driggs for a dollar at Broulims that were the real deal.

We climbed one of the nearby rock piles on top, and then got rousted off them because they are out of bounds. The liftie originally said that was Indian sacred ground, and that didn't move anybody. Once he started crying about how he was only trying to do his job, we all came in bounds. Between that and the owner(?) telling us to move our car because our dogs were too loud, we didn't stick around afterwards to spend money in the bar or grill (no wonder your parking lot is empty!). We walked down one of the steeper runs rather than ride the chairlift down. I wanted to see where all the rocks were, and am now convinced they need at least 4 feet to cover all the residual boulders.

The road back was a total shit show with the worst being in Farson where the roads converged. I'd do it again though.
 
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Tom K.

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We were at 98.x in Hood River, so viewed from the driveway. It was cool to see the non-eclipsed crescent migrate clockwise around the moon.

My two favorite pics:


smith_rock_solar_eclipse_oregon.jpg



IMG_0690.JPG
 

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