Total Solar Eclipse 8/21/2017 from Hiwassee College, Madisonville TN

Did you see the total solar eclipse on August 21, 2017?

Brita and I drove 10 hours south to Madisonville TN, right in the center of the "totality" band. Very cool! We saw all the usual partial eclipse stuff, watching through our eclipse glasses as the moon hid more and more of the sun. But also got to see the dramatic effects of the "totality".

Suddenly it got very dark and the cicadas went nuts with their chirping, etc. For 2.5 minutes, we could look directly at the sun w/o our eclipse glasses and see the long wispy strands of the sun's corona around the edges of the moon. Totally different experience from a partial eclipse. Amazing!

I used my cell phone to take a video of it getting suddenly dark and another of it getting suddenly light. I also took pictures of some pinhole camera effects. Each dot of light is a crescent whether coming through a pinhole in a piece of paper, or through the small gaps in the weave of my straw hat, or just the light filtering through the leaves of the trees to the sidewalk. But, I wasn't able to get a good shot of the eclipse directly, either with or without shielding the camera lens with my eclipse glasses. The pics I got came out so blurry (since the camera wasn't focusing far enough away and I probably wasn't holding the camera still enough) that you just see a white dot, like a regular picture of an un-eclipsed sun.

Traffic and motels were manageable on the way down. We purposely stopped about 2 hours short to be sure to get a motel room, but we cut it pretty close. 3 hotels booked up, but we got the last room in the 4rd one at 1:30 am. The guy who walked in behind me, and the person who called while I was there both got turned away. Got up at 5:30 am and kept driving to beat morning traffic. Settled in at the campus of Hiwassee College in Madisonville TN, parked under a tree and took a nap, then got up to watch the eclipse. The guy next to us was from Chicago (930 miles away) and had brought a huge telescope with a dark filter so we could all take turns watching the eclipse happening over the course of an hour or so. Same as watching with our eclipse glasses, but magnified to the size of a basketball. Nice!

I took a picture through the telescope, and it came out pretty well. You can clearly see the sharp edge of the moon blocking the sun. But there was some weird lens effect so it looks like there's a big black dot in the middle of the exposed part of the sun. Like a big sunspot or something. Was not there when I looked through the telescope by eye, only when I held the camera up to the eyepiece. Who knows?...

Traffic coming back north was REALLY bad. Everyone must have packed up and hit the road at exactly the same time. The 10 hour drive home took 17 hours. We sat in a 300-mile traffic jam on I-81 with traffic erratically going from 60mph to 0 and back every few minutes. Gave up and stopped at a hotel for the night around midnight on Monday (4 hotels sold out, got the last room at the 5th one). Got up and sat in traffic again all day Tuesday.

We made one cool side trip. Got tired of looking at brake lights hour after hour, so we stopped at Natural Bridge State Park in VA. It was WAY more impressive and more interesting than we expected. 215 foot high stone bridge connecting 2 vertical canyon walls on opposite sides of a river. 90 feet long, 100 feet wide, 40 feet thick. Has been there for thousands of years, serving as a bridge across the river canyon for American Indians, then for Constoga wagons, and now carrying US highway 11.

We ended up spending 2.5 hours hiking around, exploring the area -- the bridge, the river, the re-created Indian pallisade and village, the waterfalls, hidden river, saltpeter cave, etc. Had a great time and thought we'd given traffic plenty of time to disperse. But when we got back on the road it was still brake lights for several more hours. Uggghh!

In 2024, we may go to Ohio for the eclipse, but will plan to arrive a day early and stay 2 days late.

Check out the natural bridge at pics at: