Total Eclipse of the Sun

I'm not usually a very impulsive person.  But I gave in to an impulse this week, and with agreement from my adventurous family, we had a very nice and unusual experience.

Solar eclipses don't occur all that often.  I remember a couple of times in my youth, seeing a partial eclipse.  And I vaguely recall being in a total eclipse once but don't recall any details.  So when the news reports this week started talking about an eclipse that would be total in southern Utah, I was intrigued.  And when they mentioned that the center line of the totality would pass right through Kanarraville, I was even more interested, for reasons that will be described shortly.

On Friday I made a quick trip up to the Planetarium in SLC to purchase the appropriate "solar viewers" that allowed us to look at the sun safely.  Not having a vehicle large enough for all of us, we rented a minivan at the cost of $140 (impulsive trips sometimes aren't cheap).  I arranged to miss some Sunday afternoon meetings without much problem.  And so, after attending our other morning meetings, we all packed up some fried chicken and other necessities that had been purchased the day before, and started the 3 1/2 hour drive down south.  It was fun to be together with our children and their little families.  It was nice to have Jenna along to continue to build that relationship.

We knew there would be others wanting to be at the "center line" of the event.  Arriving in Kanarraville about an hour before the eclipse would begin, we were surprised to see the crowds of vehicles lining all the roads for several miles leading into the city, packing the city park and other areas.  It was amazing!  And we were a little early; it got worse as the evening progressed.

We drove into town and then out a small road to the cemetery, due west of the main town.  We found my 3rd-great grandfather's grave there.  The marker that is shown here replaces an old, worn, illegible one (seen behind) and was installed by a family organization in recent years as a tribute.  I sure would like to know more about the life in Old Kanarra, a century and a half ago; we don't have much information about these ancestors.

I had hoped to share the eclipse with Grandpa Davies, but after we spread out our blankets, the police came through and wouldn't let anyone stay in the cemetery itself.  We moved to the road outside the cemetery and set up our blankets.

Waiting was fun too.  We had a picnic lunch and enjoyed playing with Madison (she was still in the stroller in this photo, lower center).  It was great to be together with all of our family, including Jenna who will soon be officially part of the family!  And we enjoyed getting to know Jenna's sister who came up to visit from St. George.

The eclipse began about 6:30 p.m.  We had a discussion on the way down about the relative apparent speeds of the sun and moon in the sky - which moved faster?  Would the moon appear to "catch up" to the sun and cover it, or would the sun catch up to the moon and move behind it?  It turned out to be the latter.  As the sun descended towards the horizon, the blockage of the moon started from the lower right, and grew upwards until it was completely centered on the sun.  The whole process took about an hour, from beginning until total eclipse.

One thing we learned in preparation was the definition of an annular eclipse - when the moon is a little further away from the earth, and so actually doesn't completely obscure the sun.  It leaves a ring or annulus of light showing; at the center of the eclipse path, the moon is centered within that symmetrical ring.  In today's eclipse, the sun was about 94% obscured by the moon, with just that little "ring of fire" remaining.

This is a combined image I created later from five photos, showing the progress of the eclipse over the course of about an hour:

As the sun gradually became obscured, it became "dusky" but not really dark. With 94% of the sun blocked, the remaining ring was still surprisingly bright. Glancing at the sun's direction with the naked eye was still difficult - impossible to observe, even at peak eclipse.  We noticed more of a drop in temperature than a drop in light.  It would have been much darker if this had been a regular "total eclipse" instead of the annular variety.  We thought how eerie eclipses must have been for our ancestors who didn't fully understand what was happening.

Some people have a great sense of humor. When we reached full eclipse, a car near us turned up a blaring radio playing Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire." What a hoot!

The return trip turned out to be a real struggle.  We had hoped it would take about the same amount of time we took getting down; but unfortunately, not even close.  It took a LONG time to get out of Kanarraville - the backups to get to the freeway were slow.  Then things moved pretty well until we approached Nephi, where the traffic suddenly came to a standstill.  For reasons that were not obvious (we assume some future construction project), there were evil orange traffic barrels merging all the traffic into a single lane, and it made for a huge backup.  We were delayed a full hour in getting home.  UGH.

But it was worth it - fun to participate in a relatively rare phenomenon of nature and to create another family memory.

Here are a few more photos of the event - it's easy to see what the main attraction, other than the eclipse, was (click to view slide show):