Reflections On Totality

It's over. The solar glasses have been discarded. The sea of humanity that had migrated to a 60-mile-wide transcontinental strip of real estate has dispersed towards home - back to daily life, yet hopefully buoyed by the singular experience of totality. So much happened so fast, that it's taken a bit of time to reflect on my own experience and take stock of its meaning.

For me, the most striking realization has been that totality is nothing like the partial phases. The experience of 95% - even 98% obscuration is much closer to the experience of 50% or 70% than it is to 100%. All those moments prior to totality are simply gradations of daytime - an experience not dissimilar from a gradually thickening cloud cover. But when the umbral shadow arrives, you instantly experience twilight! It is nothing like the moments that came before. It's a quantum leap. You're suddenly down the rabbit hole and that hole is marked by the inky black spot in the sky surrounded by celestial fire that has magically appeared where the sun was just moments before.

As I write this, chills run up and down my spine and the hair is alive on the back of my neck with the memory of it. It was as if I'd been transported to an alien world, for there was no earthly experience to which I could compare those brief moments. Automatic street lights came on in the distance. Brilliant Venus appeared directly overhead. The awed sighs of a thousand people around me punctuated an alien stillness that had suddenly descended upon us.

The view through the telescope of the coronal ring - now without the solar filter - was astonishing and just a few degrees away the red giant star Regulus shown brightly. If not for the fact that I know better, I could easily have interpreted this utterly foreign spectacle as a herald of impending apocalypse. It's easy to understand how our ancestors came to that conclusion.

And then, the familiar returned. I was returned to Earth. The quantum shift shifted back and I instantly and deeply understood why people chase totality. Two minutes and 10 seconds slipped by in a blink of an eye and I longed for more.

If any of this intrigues you, I urge you to make plans to rendezvous with the umbral shadow at least once in your lifetime. The next total eclipse in the US will be April of 2024. It's already marked on my calendar. Even more opportunities are available to us, if we're will to travel elsewhere in the world. Let's go!