So Monday was the eclipse. I assume if you're reading this you already know that, unless you've been off the grid for a month, in which case: hi, welcome back, a chunk of the country got dark in the middle of the afternoon and everyone lost their minds a little.
I wasn't anywhere near the path of totality. Where I am we got something like 75-ish percent coverage, which from what I've read afterward is basically "notice the light looks weird and it got a little chilly" territory rather than the full stars-out, crickets-chirping, grown-adults-crying experience people in Oregon and Nebraska and South Carolina apparently had. Still wanted to see it properly though, which is where my week got dumber than it needed to be.
About ten days out I'd ordered a three-pack of eclipse glasses off Amazon for something like $12, because every article I read said the drugstore stuff was already sold out. Then last week I get this email saying the ones I bought might not actually meet the ISO safety standard and Amazon's refunding me automatically and I should not use them to look at the sun. Great. Thanks. So now it's four days before the eclipse and I've got zero pairs of glasses and apparently half of Amazon's third-party eclipse glasses inventory was garbage that never got properly tested. I don't think that's a small thing either, there were legitimately fake certification stickers going around, printed to look like the real ISO 12312-2 mark. Somebody out there was mass-producing counterfeit eye safety equipment for a two-minute astronomical event and I have a hard time deciding if that's impressively cynical or just sad.
Anyway I did not get real glasses in time. What I did instead, and I'm only a little embarrassed about this, is the cereal-box pinhole thing from every "how to safely watch" listicle that went around that week. Poked a hole in a Cheerios box with a pushpin, stood with my back to the sun in the office parking lot at like 1:15 in the afternoon, and watched a tiny crescent-shaped smear of light project onto a piece of printer paper taped inside the box. Coworker walked by and asked if I was doing some kind of art project. Told her no, astronomy, badly.
Had NASA's YouTube stream open in a tab most of the afternoon too, half-working, half-glancing over every few minutes. It buffered constantly around the moment of totality out west, which I get, I read later they were pulling something like unprecedented numbers of concurrent viewers, way past anything a normal livestream gets. Kind of funny watching a live broadcast of a celestial event get rate-limited by server capacity. Very 2017 problem to have.
The detail from the whole day that's stuck with me isn't even mine, it's the Bonnie Tyler thing. Royal Caribbean had her on a cruise ship in the path of totality and had her actually sing "Total Eclipse of the Heart" as the moon covered the sun, live, on a boat, timed to the eclipse. I don't care how much of a stunt that obviously was, that's a genuinely great bit and whoever on that ship's marketing team pitched it deserves a raise. I saw a video clip of it circulating within like an hour of it happening, which says something about how fast this stuff moves around now compared to even a few years back.
Also saw a lot of people online worrying they'd fried their phone cameras pointing them straight at the sun during totality without any filter, which, maybe, I have no idea if that's actually a widespread problem or just anxious tweeting, but either way it made me glad I didn't even try to get a photo. Some things you just watch instead of documenting. Radical concept, I know.
Next one visible from anywhere near here isn't until 2024, apparently, so I've got seven years to buy real glasses ahead of time instead of four days before.