My eclipse story
April 8ᵗʰ, 2024: Kid #1 wanted to see the total eclipse, and she bought my car, so I drove her. We went to Main St. in Norwich ON, which seemed like the closest totality-spot to our house that would not require any westward travel for the drive home. It was cloudy when we left, but cleared up by the time we arrived.
In this photo, there is a picnic bench at 42.9871°N, 80.5999°W and a water-tower off to the left. At eclipse-time (3:20pm), the Sun was roughly above the white house. Across the street, flying the sideways maple-leaf flag, is a Foodland supermarket. Kid #1 had pre-checked its sale flyer and found nothing interesting. Behind us in this photo is the Norwich Deli and Bakery, where we had planned to waste some time during the partial eclipse and maybe get a bite to eat.
Norwich Deli is reasonably large, but I didn’t find anything I wanted to eat there. The food was all labelled in Dutch. A lot of it seemed to be from American factories, shipped to the Netherlands for wholesale and then reshipped to Canada for retail. My area of Ontario was pioneered by German-speaking Mennonites, so I had not seen these Dutch food-names before. Money at our house is extremely tight these days and I am generally not very hungry due to denture issues, so a “just because” purchase seemed inappropriate. I had thought to buy a sandwich, but they emphasized their gooey Goudanon-PGI cheese and I am generally not a fan of oily foods. So instead I sat in the car (parked behind the viewpoint of this photo) while Kid #1 walked up and down Main St., contributing to Open Street Maps and thinking that there will probably never again be a reason for us to visit this town.
We are very unfriendly people and I did not talk to the townies except to refuse (hopefully graciously) their offers of assistance at the deli. We just needed a spot to see the Sun and they had one; it was unfortunate that I didn’t find anything I wanted to buy from them.
Eventually we just sat at the picnic bench, waiting for totality. No one competed with us for the spot. There are around 700,000 other people in my metro area, but apparently no one else made this trek out to the boonies. There were a few people parked in front of the Foodland, wearing their eclipse glasses and staring at the Sun. I didn’t think that was a good idea. I arranged my eclipse glasses above my regular glasses, so if I looked up I saw the Moon partially blocking the Sun, but if I looked down I could see the grass. It worked great! Really, you only need to look at the partial eclipse for a second at a time to see how it’s progressing.
As the darkness of totality approached, it got windy and cooler and ominous, until suddenly the corona popped out and all was peaceful for two minutes. I can’t find an animation that shows what the corona looked like to me. It was a thin blueish-white ring that (because we’re at Solar Maximum) went all the way around the Sun. It is visibly turbulent because it contains material being expelled at supersonic speeds from a out-of-control fusion reactor. I could not see the blue outermost part of the corona, which we recently learned extends 18.8 radii out from the Sun’s disk, when the material finally slows down enough to become the solar wind. I didn’t do the trig to figure out how far across the sky that is, and therefore where the Parker Solar Probe was positioned during the eclipse.
After the total, it was back to the partial eclipse until 4:30. But we couldn’t stick around for that because 4:30 was also when Kid #1’s work shift started, so I drove home during the partial. I think I was successful in preventing the Sun from shining into my eyes from any angle during the drive home. Eyestrain the following day seemed minimal.
As we arrived home, we took a moment to use our eclipse glasses for one last time; the Sun was still maybe 10% occluded. There will not be another total eclipse in my part of the world for the next 120 years. It was nice to see, but two hours of travel for a 2-minute show seems about my limit, so I don’t expect that I’ll be travelling to Australia to see the 2028 eclipse.