Total Eclipse

This year, a total solar eclipse passed right over Idaho Falls.  Our area was such an ideal place to view the eclipse, that NASA chose it as their official headquarters (the Museum of Idaho to be exact).  Hotels began filling months in advance in all the areas that would experience totality.  Experts projected that we would have an extra 500,000 people in our area for the eclipse.  It was full-out doomsday preparation mode in the area.  They didn't know how that many people would affect our cell service, our power, our traffic, our hospitals, etc.  They planned to bring port-a-potties on the side of the freeway and advised people to travel with extra gas and plenty of food and water.  It was nuts.  

My brother Jeff called a couple months in advance and asked what our plans were.  They said they really wanted to come up and see it.  So we told them to come and have a sleepover with us.  I warned him that traffic was going to be horrid.  And if the situation were reversed I really don't think I would've driven in the traffic and dealt with the crowds to go to Utah to watch it.  (Thank Heavens that wasn't the case because it was so incredible!!!  I want to see more!)

They drove up Sunday night and said the traffic was fine.  Plenty of cars but not stopped or even slowed.  We had dinner and hung out.  Ryan had rented a bouncy house for an activity they did the day before so that was up in our yard for the kids to play on.  The eclipse was Monday with totality at 11:33 am.  We would see totality for a total of 88 seconds.  The areas North of us got it for over two minutes.  

It turns out the predictions were not completely accurate, though the whole area bought out the food at the grocery stores beforehand.  During the weekend of the Eclipse everyone stayed home!  Things were much calmer than predicted.  I'm not sure what the actual numbers were in our area, but we did not lose power or have any big disasters or accidents.  We didn't even lose cell service, though it was a bit slower than normal.  My brother and his family took off right after we saw totality and they had some traffic but only like and hour or maybe two longer than they would have.  Not bad at all.  Some people took like 6 hours just to get to Logan.

We had fun watching as the invisible moon slowly started making it's way across the sun.  I spent some time trying to rig my camera with a "filter" (I refused to buy something just for that hour or so that I would probably never have use for again).  I tore apart an extra pair of glasses and it actually worked kind of!  I'm glad I got a few pictures with the filter, but the really awesome stuff was during totality and we didn't need a filter for that.

 Viewing totality was something special for sure.  There were lots of articles being passed around about eclipses and some of our favorites had to do with how amazing they are and how they are proof that God exists.  The fact that the huge sun and the tiny moon happen to be the perfect distance away from each other and Earth for this phenomenon to happen.  And it was definitely a spiritual experience watching it unfold.  Nature is amazing and powerful.  I love these wonders that are gifts from God.

Some cool things other than the actual atmosphere of the sun that was visible, and the solar flares and the diamond ring as the first sun's ray breaks through again...  Shadow snakes!  Hard to see and make you a bit dizzy, but we saw them.  Crescents in the shadows- this is one we hadn't heard about so we didn't look but we saw other people's pictures and videos.  The 360 degree sunset was neat- the horizon lit up all around.  And we saw a couple stars, though I'm pretty sure one of them was Venus.  Stars! At 11:33 am.  It got so cold and eerily dark leading up to it.  We had a lot of fun waiting for it to progress.  But totality was more than any of us were really prepared for.  Just so incredible.  I seriously want to travel east for the next one in seven years.  there's another one that crosses just south of this one in 28 years.  It goes over Utah and Florida.  I plan to see that one for sure!!!

I was thrilled that I got some really neat pictures! Like, really excited!  I got online to share what I had got and I assumed I would see similar things from my friends, especially my photog friends, but I didn't.  I had tons of compliments on my pictures and people asking if they can share them.  I guess my post was set to "private- friends only" which means they could not share it.  So my friend took the pictures and made her own post.  She tagged me and I didn't mind.  What I did not realize is that people were sharing her post, and some of them were not giving me credit, or letting others believe that they took the pictures.  Another bizarre thing was when I was scrolling through my facebook feed and started seeing my pictures in other people's posts without any acknowledgement to me.  I felt oddly violated.  I had plenty of friends ask me permission to share the photos, and I didn't care at all.  I didn't need them to ask me permission, so long as they tagged me and gave me credit, which they all did.  So when I saw a picture of mine popping up here or there randomly without giving me credit, I was weirded out.  Turns out some of the 60+ people who had shared Melanie's post with my photos had acted like they took them.  It was all just a big mess and I had to let it go because I did not watermark the pictures so I had no control over where they went or who used them.  Oh well.  I just felt like if my shots were something special, I wanted to be given the credit and not have them all over as if anyone could have taken them.  I spent some time studying how to get a good shot and I wasted some of the time I could've been enjoying the magical moment of totality by having my face in my lens, so yeah, I felt a bit robbed.  But the hype died down after a week and everything is good now.