So it's been six days and I'm only just now writing about the eclipse, which feels about right for this blog at this point. I had every intention of doing a same-day post last Monday and then I spent the rest of the week catching up on work I ignored because I was standing in my driveway staring at the sun like an idiot.
We weren't in the path of totality. I looked at driving up toward the line, it went through a chunk of Tennessee that was maybe four hours from here, and decided against it at the last minute because I didn't want to deal with traffic on the way back. Everyone who did make the drive says it was worth it, that partial just isn't the same thing at all, and I believe them, but I got about 91% coverage from my own backyard and honestly it was still pretty wild. The light gets this strange flat quality about twenty minutes before max coverage that no photo I've seen really captures. Colors go weird. The temperature actually dropped enough that I noticed it on my arms.
Speaking of photos: mine are garbage. I tried the thing where you hold your phone camera up against the lens of the eclipse glasses and I got maybe one shot out of forty that wasn't either a black rectangle or a blown-out white blob. My kid did a pinhole projector with a cereal box that honestly worked better than my $600 phone, which tells you something about the limits of computational photography when you point it at the single brightest object in the solar system. I'm not even mad about it anymore, I've just accepted that my eclipse documentation consists of one smudgy crescent and forty pictures of my own thumb.
The glasses situation this year was its own little mess if you were paying attention. A friend of mine ordered a pack off Amazon back in July and then got an email a few weeks later saying the ones she bought hadn't actually been vetted by the right safety standard and Amazon was refunding them. She ended up borrowing a pair from our library's eclipse-viewing event instead, which is what I did too, the library had ordered like 300 of them and ran out an hour before the event started. There's something very 2017 about a total solar eclipse causing a run on cardboard glasses.
One thing that got almost completely buried under eclipse coverage: the Essential Phone actually started shipping this week. Remember that thing? Andy Rubin, one of the guys who built Android, left Google to start a hardware company, and after a year of hype and delayed release dates the PH-1 finally started landing in reviewers' hands right around when everyone was staring at the sky instead of their inboxes. I don't think that timing did it any favors. It's a genuinely interesting device on paper, titanium frame, that weird little magnetic accessory port on the back, no camera bump, but launching a phone the same week as a total solar eclipse is not exactly a masterclass in press strategy. I'll believe the reviews are good when I see three of them, not one glowing hands-on from a guy who got a unit early.
I keep thinking about the fact that the next one of these visible from the US is 2024. Seven years is a long time. I have no idea what phones will look like by then, whether this blog will even still exist, whether I'll still be dragging a folding chair into the driveway to squint at a rock passing in front of a star. Probably. I like squinting at things in my driveway more than I probably should.
Anyway. If you got clouded out, I'm sorry, that happened to a bunch of people I know too and there's genuinely nothing worse than clear skies all week and then a solid gray ceiling right at 2:37pm. If you got totality, tell me about it, I want to hear it even though it'll make me a little jealous. And if your eclipse photos also came out as a smudge and a thumb, you're in good company.