ECLIPSE!

content/posts/solar-eclipse.md

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+---
+title: "A Solar Eclipse"
+date: 2024-04-08T20:41:50-04:00
+description: "Another post reviewing something and this time I promise I will actually review it"
+type: "post"
+tags: ["travel", "space", "eclipse"]
+---
+
+
+They say that a total solar eclipse is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Well more accurately, it's a twice-in-a-lifetime opportunity. At least twice.
+
+So as you may know, there was a total solar eclipse today across the eastern US, but I almost didn't go see it. I've already seen a total solar eclipse before in 2017, and while eclipses are super cool and amazing, I was a bit discouraged by the three-hour drive from Boston to the path of totality. I also don't have a car, so I'd have to find someone else to tag along with. But all the recent xkcd comics have been about eclipses (other than the April Fools' comic), so I knew I probably should go see it.
+
+Fortunately, [Alek](https://awestover.github.io/skyspace/) said he was going to go see it, so I went with him and some other friends. The drive to the nearest point in the path of totality, in Montpelier, Vermont, turned out to not just be three hours, but five hours due to traffic and all the other eclipse aficionados. I saw several custom license plates like CHESS, PHOTON, WOZNIAK, and BUSTED which should give you an idea of the kinds of people who drive hours to see a three-minute astronomical phenomena.
+
+[xkcd 2914](https://xkcd.com/2914/) says "A partial eclipse is like a cool sunset. A total eclipse is like someone broke the sky." The first part is probably wrong. The moon started covering the sun an hour before totality, but I didn't notice much change other than from looking at the sun with eclipse glasses on and noticing it had a bite taken out of it. It just darkened a little bit I guess. A few minutes before totality, the cool stuff finally started happening, such as the temperature dropping, the birds became restless and stopped chirping, and it actually started feeling like a fast sunset. Then, Zumba happened.
+
+Yes, Zumba, not totality. So a few months ago, Alek tried to recruit me to join a Zumba class, and I wasn't interested at all but decided just to go once. Well, it turned out to be a lot of fun, probably because Alek and some other friends were there. Doing Zumba with strangers would be kind of awkward. Anyways, one of the Zumba songs was, well, it took me a long time to find the right song, since there are a lot of songs with names similar to "Sun Goes Down" and some of the results were pretty weird songs. It's [this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4i4EjGKwEVw). I guess the sun wasn't really going down since it was just being blocked by the moon, but we tried Zumba-ing on a riverbank with lots of branches on the ground, so it wasn't too successful but still lots of fun.
+
+Then, it was silent and totality actually happened, and then a bunch of people cheered annoyingly. And yeah, basically someone broke the sky. Imagine it's dusk, but there's no sunset and toasty colors. It just looks like a sterile sky, but right in the middle there's a black circle with a ring of white light around it. It's like straight out of a sci-fi book or something. Sadly, I don't have any good pictures since eclipses are hard to photograph with phone cameras. I'm a bit disappointed that I didn't see [shadow bands](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_bands) unlike in 2017. It was also cloudy just as [xkcd 2915](https://xkcd.com/2915/) predicted, but Randall is also from Boston so I'm guessing we probably went to similar places to see the eclipse.
+
+Interesting sidenote: a fascinating [article](https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-ancient-art-of-eclipse-prediction-became-an-exact-science-20240405/) about the history of eclipse prediction (solar eclipses, not LLM assistance in a certain Java IDE).
+
+Still, it was a really cool experience, and I'm looking forward to the next one! 2044, maybe?