Eclipse!

Yesterday was Eclipse Day in Boston. Or 93% Eclipse Day, anyway.

The only other eclipse I remember occurred sometime during the 1990's. I know the decade because it happened when I was working at a company called Softbridge, in Cambridge, and I remember going out with colleagues to take it all in. I don't remember having special glasses. I'm pretty sure that my colleagues and I rigged up some sort of pinhole viewer using cardstock.

Anyway, I remember that we mostly kept or back to the eclipse - partial, not the totality - and that the sky became hazy-ish, and colors that were normally bright (or at least brightish) were muted. 

I have no recall of what the eclipse itself looked like.

Yesterday, since this will be my last chance to see an eclipse  without traveling a far piece, I wanted to be prepared.

Oh, I wasn't interested in running up to Vermont or Maine to view the totality with the hordes. But I did want to see what a 93% eclipse looks like.

So I ordered the special glasses on Amazon, making sure to get the ones that are blessed by whoever it is who blesses eclipse glasses. And, not trusting that some fraudsters weren't faking up ISO okays and other info claiming the glasses were blessed, once they arrived, I checked them to make sure that they "worked." It was a pretty simple test. Turn on a bright light. If it's totally black or extremely dim, you're in business.

I was in business.

I had ordered a 10 pack, so on Easter, I put a pair at all the placesettings. (Didn't want any loved ones to scorch their retinas.) And I gave a pair to my friend K, so that we could venture out together to watch after working the lunch shift at St. Francis House.

We decided to watch from the Boston Public Garden. It was getting pretty crowded by the time we arrived around 2 p.m.  - showtime began around 2:15 - but we found a good bench to plunk down on - one where tree branches wouldn't get in the way.

We first started looking up - making sure we had on the special eclipse glasses - when the moon was covering just a sliver of a sliver, and then kept checking in every few months to gauge the progress.

One-eighth. One sixth. One quarter. Three quarters. 

I was surprised how interesting it was to see the eclipse build. And how exciting it was when we reached the near totality figure of 93%.

It never got dark. And it didn't seem like being out on a cloudy day. The light had a eerieness about it, the hazy-ish but not quite hazy sky I remembered from my eclipse outing in the 1990's. The muted colors - hard to describe, maybe as if there were a brownish wash over everything.

Pretty much everyone was using special eclipse glasses, but one woman had rigged a viewer up using a box of Special K. 

The Public Garden was fairly crowded, but the west-facing hillock in the Boston Common (which is right across the way from the Public Garden) was packed. 

It was a gorgeous day: balmy (low 60's, it did get a bit cooler as the moon began covering more of the sun), blue sky (until it faded), and sunny (until it became eclipse-y). 

There won't be another solar eclipse in Boston for another 55 years. Chances are supremely good that I won't be around on May 1, 2079.

So I'm glad I got my special glasses and went out and did some eclipse spotting when I had the opportunity yesterday.

Highly recommend!