Two More Cents

Reflections on Seeing a Solar Eclipse

This Monday (April 8th, 2024), I witnessed my first ever Total Solar Eclipse, at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. It was truly a sight to behold, and an experience I will remember. What follows are a few thoughts about the eclipse and how I felt seeing it.

Leading up

I was surprised at how long it took for totality to occur. The partial eclipse began at around 1:45 PM EDT, while totality didn’t occur until about 3:05 PM. In the meantime though, I was able to witness the slow blotting-out of the Sun. I vividly remember wearing my eclipse glasses and looking up at the Sun, seeing a tiny sliver of it blotted out by the Moon. I knew then, that in a few hours, I was about to witness something truly extraordinary.

The moments leading up to totality were some of the most surreal moments I have witnessed in my life (to say nothing of the actual eclispe, of course). In these moments, I was surprised by how quickly the sky got dark. In a span of about 30 seconds, it felt like 4 hours had passed. I also strongly felt the resulting dip in temperature - I remember hearing on a NASA broadcast that the temperature can drop around 10 degrees as totality approaches. It was bizarre, especially since the skies over Indianapolis were mostly clear.

This was captured a few minutes before totality
This was captured moments before totality

Totality

I’m sure you have heard this plenty of times by now, but a total solar eclipse is worlds apart from a partial one. Those final moments, as the Sun was completely blotted out, felt dreamlike: the Sun, the source of all life, had just vanished. Totality reportedly occured for a little over 4 minutes in my region (which is a pretty long time, as far as eclipses go), but it felt like an eternity. It’s hard to put my feelings in that moment into words - it almost felt like a religious experience. I realized what my ancestors must have felt, looking at a phenomenon that, to them, must have seemed like an act of God.

Image credit: a friend.

It also felt uniquely unreal, like I was living on a different planet. There was brief moment where my brain didn’t know how to process what it was looking at: I had obviously seen images of a total solar eclipse before, but seeing it with your own eyes hits differently.

Closing thoughts

This was a lot shorter than my usual posts, because it was mostly just reflecting. I will conclude with an interesting fact, though. I recently learned about the 1504 Lunar Eclipse, which has an interesting story behind it: Christopher Columbus, on his final voyage in the Americas, convinced native islanders in Jamaica to continue provisioning him and his crew with food, by successfuly predicting the lunar eclipse. According to the article linked above, there is some dispute over the methods he used to predict it, but it was enough to convince the natives. As I think about how they must have felt - a stranger, coming to their home and predicting a celestial event, I realize how much symbolic power these events still hold in our daily lives, and I am awestruck by the scientific ingenuity that was required to predict this eclipse, not just to the day, but to the very second.