So I got back late last night from seeing the great American eclipse. I went to a national forest down near Carbondale, IL. For those who don't know, I live in a suburb of Chicago. The drive there and back was terrible, and traffic was abysmal. My family and I arrived there at about 11:00 at night the day before and we set up tents along the road by a small clearing. I admit I didn't sleep much. Too much noise. I woke up really early and got ready for the day.
So now that the mundane stuff is out of the way, let me try to explain how the eclipse went. I made some viewers out of solar filters designed for a telescope, since my eclipse glasses were counterfeit. The viewers worked quite well. The partial phase of the eclipse started at about 11:53 AM local time. As the minutes went by, I saw little bits of the sun start to disappear. It started in the upper right of the sun's disc. Over the course of about and hour and a half, the sun slowly shrank to a tiny crescen
About 20 seconds before totality, the light suddenly went from equivalent of a cloudy day right down to just after sunset. In literally seconds the light everywhere just went away. It was like someone turned a dimmer switch all the way down to the lowest level. The last bit of the sun vanished and it was time to take off the glasses. At about 1:21 PM totality began. Words cannot adequately describe what the total eclipse looked like. There aren't any adjectives to properly convey how I felt. It was the most