Total Solar Eclipse - April 8th 2024 (slightly longer version)
Channel: JDPoZ-Extra
Date: 2024-04-09

At approximately 1:41 PM on April 8th, 2024, I stood in the backyard of my older brother’s home in Rockwall county, Texas alongside my wife and elementary-school-aged child, and gazed upward at the sky to see something indescribable and only appreciable to its full extent to the naked eye :

A full and total eclipse seen from the rarest of viewpoints - the “path of totality” - a tiny ribbon tracing along a predictable yet unique path upon the surface of the Earth each time it occurs.

This is a far more special event than a regular partial or “annular” eclipse, or even a total solar eclipse as seen from anything but this “path of totality.”

Why is a total solar eclipse as seen from this “path of totality” so special? Because when you normally look upon a solar eclipse - something still somewhat rare in life overall that I have nonetheless been lucky enough to see many times from many different places in many different parts of my life - you must do so with specifically designed protective shades in order to prevent your eyes from being permanently damaged by the sun’s incredibly powerful retina-destroying rays.

…But if you’re lucky enough to see a total eclipse from within the aforementioned “path of totality,” depending on how close you are to the very center of that tiny ribbon tracing the Earth along a line at thousands of miles an hour, there is but a moment - a moment that is maybe 1-4 minutes long - where no protective eyewear is needed.

A moment… where the sun is gone.

The place where you stand suddenly feels cooler than it was before, as all of Sol’s warmth, but also its eye-destroying rays become masked in shadow by the Moon… enveloping it completely.

In that moment, you can look up at the moon with your unshielded eyes as it fully hides the sun and see a rare and normally unviewable phenomenon - one that mind you is always present around the sun, but normally hidden from our delicate and limited sense of sight by our local star’s blinding light :

The sun’s corona.

It is a “ring of fire” that appears around the umbra (or “core shadow”) of the Moon as the sky is darkened like night - with a colorful horizon in all directions as if the sun were setting somehow on all sides of the Earth instead of just generally off to the West… and nightfall was somehow starting to begin in the middle of the day.

It was a spectacular event - in the truest sense of the overused term “spectacular.” A spectacle of which there is no parallel.

It is something that brought tears to my eyes and continues to do so - at least while I remember it still fresh in my mind’s eye.

So, in closing, I know that everyone who has experienced it says this, but I will still add my own voice to the chorus and recommend this beyond any other viewable phenomena you can see from the surface of the Earth.

It is something I wish all could see, and an event that I probably won’t have the chance to lay eyes upon again, for at LEAST another 20 years…

...Also, sorry for the click-bait-y "soyface" thumbnail. I didn't set it. It was done automatically. YouTube won't let me change it. ( ; _ ; )