And everything under the sun is in tune

[austin_dern]

So as mentioned in my excuse yesterday we were at Cedar Point for the eclipse. The park hosted a special ``Total Eclipse of the Point'' event, with tickets that our season passes weren't valid for. bunnyhugger had leapt on the chance for them when they came out and from there we had just to hope the clouds wouldn't be too heavy. The morning was beautiful and almost cloudless, but as totality approached a light haze rolled in. Fortunately, not too much, and through the park-provided eclipse shades you couldn't even notice anything.

We set up just outside the park's entrance, with bunnyhugger putting her big digital camera and its nice long lens with a shielding foil wrapped around it. I stuck to the camera I've used for almost all my pictures for seven(?) years now, occasionally putting the park's eclipse shades over the lens so I could take a blurry, unfocused picture of the sun. My camera has been getting more dodgy about zooming and auto-focusing lately and maybe I should have gotten it fixed before now. (And if that weren't enough I dropped it on the concrete a few minutes before totality, although it seemed to survive all right, far as I could tell.)

For much of the approach of totality it was just a sun that, through the shades, had less of itself in there. But in the last couple minutes the skies darkened, but around the zenith, staying bright on the horizon, in a way you never see in the world. Then totality came and everything felt strange and different. It was gorgeous. The Moon looked like it was hanging weirdly in the sky, like it was defying physics. It wasn't, of course, but you never see the Moon against something of similar visual heft in the sky. The corona looked three-dimensional, like it was a thing I could hold.

bunnyhugger snapped a number of photos, figuring out among other things that she needed to turn her exposure way down. It was still on the too-long shutters appropriate for shooting through the protective screen. I did take a moment to demand her attention, to kiss her, but we were so excited and dazed and all that I missed her mouth to start. Also as promised, the seagulls yelled at each other and flew in from the shore to roost and the temperature dropped with a speed we didn't know could manage. And still the sky hung there, shade and light all in the wrong places.

And then there was this little pinpoint of brilliant light and totality was over and we had to cover up to look at the tiniest sliver of the sun again. And we just coped with this feeling of having been through something so momentous and so massive and so different that we couldn't quite express it. We'd spend a lot of the first minutes after totality talking about that, and keep coming back to the feeling from there. I don't think we have it processed yet and I'm not sure we ever will. I keep coming back to feeling staggered that I was in a line connecting the Sun and the Moon and Earth. What are the odds of that?

Now I know what you're wondering is did I get pictures? Yes, I did, and let me share --- hosted on my humor blog so I know it'll work even as LiveJournal, which semi-eptly serves all my photos for both LiveJournal and Dreamwidth, struggles --- my best photo of totality. You ready?

Nailed it.

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bunnyhugger has considerably better photographs, aided by her having a better camera and a tripod and having prepared by reading tips about eclipse photography that she's sure she forgot but something probably stuck anyway.

I'll have a full report of our eclipse trip soon --- the end of the Women's North American Championship Series pinball trip has to come first, then Easter, then Motor City Furry Con, if I'm going to stick to chronological order. But I did want to get some thoughts down when they were nice and fresh and on everyone's minds.

Trivia: In its heyday the A&P took in about ten cents of every dollar spent on food in the United States. (This at a time when Americans spent about three-tenths of their income on food, more even than they spent on housing.) Source: Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America, Michael Ruhlman.