Watching the Eclipse

I lay on the bench beside a pond in a suburban Nashville park. Beside me, the ducks were preening and cleaning their feathers.

I watched as the sun disappeared behind the moon. With my special eclipse glasses, I could see nothing else in the dark sky. The effect was weirdly two-dimensional: The moon, appearing as a black disc, slowly covered up the sun's white-disc appearance, and now, a thin crescent remained. The rest of the sky was a deep gray.

Then everything disappeared.

I took off my glasses and looked up. Two minutes before totality, a cloud had covered the sun and the moon.

But the good news was that it was a single, fluffy cloud crossing an otherwise clear sky. And the park had lots of open ground, so moving uphill a few yards was enough to find a clear spot to view the sun and the moon. I put on my glasses, lay down, and looked up.

I found what I was there for, as the moon's disc now covered most of the sun, which now looked like a crescent sun. Only a small sliver of the sun showed behind the moon. Slowly, that crescent grew thinner and thinner, then became a small white dot. Presently, the dot vanished.

I removed my glasses. What I saw brought on a feeling of awe, and a wide grin, as my exclamations of joy joined those of my fellow eclipse watchers. The dark, almost night sky. The birds flying across the sky, seeming confused. The deep dark black of the moon. The dazzling white corona of the sun, flickering and flashing and showing itself around the rim of the moon. It was spectacular, a sight worth traveling hundreds of miles to see.

(By the way, the photos are from the NASA site.)