Tomorrow at some point in the early afternoon, depending on where you're reading this from, the sky is going to do something weird. I've had it circled on the kitchen calendar since January and now that it's actually the night before, I'm doing what I always do the night before anything important: last-minute panicking about logistics instead of just enjoying the anticipation.
Specifically I spent about forty five minutes tonight going through the eclipse glasses drawer trying to figure out which pairs are legit and which ones I should just throw away.
Here's the thing nobody tells you until you're already three purchases deep: apparently there's been a real problem this year with counterfeit eclipse glasses on Amazon and at gas stations, glasses that print "ISO 12312-2" on the frame (the safety standard number) without actually being certified to that standard at all. The American Astronomical Society has been putting out warnings about this for weeks. Some of the fakes let through way more visible and infrared light than they should, which is the kind of thing you do not want to discover by looking directly at the sun. I bought a five-pack off Amazon back in February for something like $13, and now I genuinely can't tell if they're the real American Paper Optics ones or a knockoff with the exact same font copied onto them. I ended up doing the flashlight test (hold them up, look at a bright bulb, you should barely see the filament) on all five pairs at my kitchen table like a paranoid person. Three passed. Two are going in the trash.
I'm not even in the path of totality, which is the other thing bugging me. I'm getting something like 91% coverage where I live, according to the calculator NASA has up on their eclipse site. Ninety one percent sounds like a lot until someone who's actually driving down to be in the path explains that the difference between 99% and 100% is basically the entire experience — the corona, the temperature drop, birds going quiet, all of it apparently only shows up in the last sliver. My brother in law is driving to Ohio tonight with his kids to sit in a Walmart parking lot inside the path of totality, which feels a little extreme to me, but also I get it, and also I am a little jealous, and also I am absolutely not driving anywhere tomorrow because I have a call at 2pm I cannot move.
NASA's doing a livestream starting around 1pm Eastern tomorrow, which I'll probably have open in a background tab even though I'll technically be watching the real thing out my actual window with my (verified, real) glasses on. There's something a little funny about that, watching a livestream of the sky next to the actual sky, but I know myself and I know I'll do it anyway, mostly to see the path-of-totality shots from Texas and Indiana and wherever else before it reaches me.
Unrelated tangent because it's my blog and I can do this: I also spent way too long today trying to figure out if my phone camera is going to be able to capture any of this at all without a solar filter on the lens, and the consensus from every forum post I read is basically "no, don't bother, you'll blow out the sensor or get a white blob, just watch it with your eyes." Which is annoying to hear as someone who has been conditioned by a decade of phones with increasingly good cameras to believe I can photograph anything. Apparently this is one of those situations where the eyeball still wins.
Anyway. Glasses sorted, three good pairs set aside on the counter, alarm set a little early even though the partial phase where I am doesn't start until early afternoon, because I want coffee in me and the porch chairs set up before anything starts happening. If you're somewhere in the path tomorrow, or even just getting a partial like me, check your glasses twice. And if the ones you bought were suspiciously cheap and came in a pack of twenty for eight dollars, do the flashlight test before you trust them with your retinas.
More after totality, assuming it's worth writing about, which given how much of the internet has been talking about this for a month, it probably is.