So today was the eclipse. If you're reading this outside North America, or you somehow avoided every single piece of media for the last two weeks, a big chunk of the continent had a total solar eclipse pass over it this afternoon, cutting a line from Mazatlán up through Texas, the Midwest, into New York and New England and out over Canada. I am not in that line. I am, generously, about 90% covered, which sounds like a lot until someone who actually saw totality tells you it isn't even close, and then you believe them because they will not stop telling you.
I want to talk about the tech side of today because the astronomy side has been covered to death by literally everyone with a blog, a newsletter, or a cousin in Cleveland.
First: the phone camera thing. There was a solid week of "your phone camera can explode if you point it at the eclipse" content floating around, shared by people who clearly did not fact-check it against, you know, physics. Phones do not explode. What actually happens is the image gets blown out into a useless white blob unless you've got a proper solar filter over the lens, which is a much less exciting headline so nobody wrote that one. I tried anyway, with a scrap of eclipse-glasses film taped over my phone camera with a binder clip holding it in place because I did not plan ahead. The results were mediocre. You get a small dim orange smudge and a lot of regret about not owning a real camera.
Second, the livestream situation. NASA ran their main coverage starting early afternoon Eastern, cutting between feeds in Texas, Indiana, and up toward Maine, and it was genuinely well produced, but my stream kept buffering at exactly the moments people in the path were losing their minds over totality, which felt personal. I don't think it was NASA's fault. I think it was my own internet, which has been doing this weird afternoon slowdown thing for a month now and I keep not calling my provider about it because I know the call will take forty minutes and end with them telling me to reset the router I have already reset four times.
The eclipse glasses situation deserves its own paragraph. My local library gave away a stack of the ISO-certified ones weeks ago, for free, and I grabbed two. Meanwhile there's a guy set up outside the grocery store today selling what are almost certainly the same style of glasses for twenty bucks a pair, cash only, no verification sticker visible from where I was standing. People were buying them. I get impulse-buying a sandwich. I do not get impulse-buying unverified eye protection from a folding table.
The other thing that stuck with me was watching the cell networks brace for this like it was a hurricane. Carriers had been quietly beefing up capacity in path-of-totality towns for weeks, because small towns like Russellville, Arkansas were about to get a population spike measured in the hundreds of thousands for one afternoon, and every single one of those visitors was going to try to post a photo at the exact same moment. Some of these places have maybe a couple thousand residents normally. That's an infrastructure problem disguised as a tourism opportunity, and I have to assume some network engineers had a genuinely rough Monday.
Around 2pm here the sky did get noticeably dim, that weird flat grey light where everything looks slightly wrong, like the color balance on the whole outdoors got nudged. Birds went quiet for a few minutes. It was neat! Not totality neat, apparently, but neat. My kid tried the cereal-box pinhole trick and got bored of it in about ninety seconds, which tracks.
Anyway. Next one visible from anywhere near here isn't for a while, so I guess this is what we've got. If you were actually in the path today, in Dallas or Indianapolis or wherever, and you got clear skies, I am extremely jealous and also slightly annoyed at you, in the specific way you can only be annoyed at someone for having good weather.