We’ve put away the special sunglasses, all the photos have been posted, and we’ve returned to our regularly scheduled programs, but the image of the Great North American Eclipse of 2024 will remain embedded in the minds of the generations who witnessed it (and, no, not just because some tried to sneak a peek without the glasses). I’ve taken a couple days to decompress, to ponder it all, and relive in my mind those glorious four minutes of complete totality here in the Cleveland, Ohio, area. Sure, there will be other eclipses, and I could travel the globe somewhere to witness totality again, but it won’t be like this one again.
I mentioned in my previous blog post that Jennifer had come into town from Rhode Island and my daughter, Arielle, from Oklahoma – that they both braved the travel for this when roads and airports were packed was truly amazing. We also celebrated Arielle’s birthday, which was on Saturday, so it was an entire extended-weekend celebration for multiple reasons. At my sister’s house where we had a cookout and watched the eclipse take place, plenty of family was present, and my niece and nephew ventured out one of second floor windows of the house and onto the garage roof with a few of their friends to view the event – not because it offered a better vantage point, but because they were kids being kids.
While the anticipation grew and we caught glimpses of the moon slowly creeping over the Sun, we got caught up in conversation with friends and family, invited a random Amazon delivery man up for a burger while he worked his route, and talked to a new neighbor who had just moved in from Frederick, Maryland, where I had previously raised my kids for 11 years many moons ago – such a small world. It was really that last 20 minutes, however, when we really started to notice the changes of the environment around us. It grew darker and cooler, and the way the light scattered across the landscape was almost unnatural. Jennifer likened it to the way the lights would illuminate the field during high school football games when we were kids growing up back in the 1980s. It just didn’t seem quite real with the way the shadows were cast in the dim glow.
When just a sliver of the Sun was still visible, we were finally able to cast off the sunglasses and view the eclipse with the naked eye, although it still pretty much looked like a giant ball of light without the eyewear. But once that moon locked into place over the Sun and all went dark above us, there was a collective, “Whoa,” amongst us as we stared at the silvery glowing circle in the heavens. It was truly a surreal moment, and even with all the amazing photographs that were taken, there is no way to truly capture that image that hung above us for those four short minutes. How fascinating it was that 96 million miles away we could see with our own eyes massive prominences – what many of us were calling solar flares at the time – erupting from the surface of the Sun, powerful jets of gas far larger than the size of the Earth. For me, while I was completely awestruck at the time, I also felt a wonderful peace throughout the experience as world grew quiet, almost reverent of the moment, as a silver shimmering circle brandished itself in the sky where our Sun should be.
In true 2024 fashion, however, we did all clamor for our phones to try to capture this amazing moment – my daughter got the best photos, so I gave up trying and just grabbed hers. A shot that I could have gotten with my phone that I wish I would have was the 360 degree sunset all around us along the horizon. That was pretty wild, as well, with its reds and pinks and oranges cascading off the faint clouds that almost threatened our day, but the true spectacle was hovering directly above us, and I wanted to take that in for as long as I could. Once the moon moved out of totality and the first rays of sunlight burst forth from beyond, there was another collective cry from the crowd, this time an, “Aww…,” and the photo trading began. Again, Arielle captured the best images from our group (my niece, Emily, got some good ones, too), and the dialogue quickly shifted to replay mode.
Perhaps our rituals in 2024 are a bit different than rituals from thousands of years ago – we’re eating burgers and drinking beers out in the driveway while an ancient cuneiform tablet from Mesopotamia described their eclipse rituals as:
“As the eclipse begins, the... priest shall light the torch, and attach it to the altar... As long as the eclipse lasts, the fire upon the altar thou shalt not remove. A dirge for the fields thou shalt intone; a dirge for the streams that the water shall not devastate, thou shalt intone... As long as the eclipse lasts, the people of the land shall remove their headgear; they shall cover their heads with their garments.”
Yeah, we didn’t do that. Although, instead of lighting torches the streetlights did turn on. So, two days later, guests having traveled back home and back in our regular routines, what does this all mean?
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