The 2017 Total Solar Eclipse: The Experience

This is really a set of three blog posts. 

In the first post, I detail my attempt to record the 2017 Total Solar Eclipse using my camera phone and telescope with solar filter.

In the second, I explain what the 2017 TSE felt like in Gallatin, Tennessee, starting at 11:59am, ECT and extending through 2:54pm, with a local totality duration of 2 minutes and 37 seconds.

In the third, I give a quick explanation of how I turned my 1200 photographs into a short film of the TSE, which I will post as soon as it is done.

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The 2017 total solar eclipse in Nashville, Tennessee easily ranks in my top 5 greatest life experiences.  It’s probably number 2, topped only by my wedding day.  Here I try to explain just what this event felt like.  It is easy to Google lots of images of total solar eclipses.  It is hard to get a real sense of the feelings before and during the TSE, the whole sensory experience of totality.  If you missed the 2017 TSE, please- for the love of God- start making plans right now to see the 2024 TSE as it passes on a northeast path through Mazatlán, Durango, Torreón, and Piedras Negras, Mexico; Dallas, Texas; Indianapolis, Indiana; Cleveland, Ohio; Buffalo, New York; Plattsburgh, New York; Miramichi, New Brunswick; and Newfoundland.  My wife and I are musing about the possibility of seeking the 2026 TSE in Iceland, and/or the 2028 TSE as it passes through the entire width of Australia.  I am now insatiably, permanently addicted to total solar eclipses.

My friend Michael Genau texted me a few weeks before the 2017 TSE, suggesting we should road trip down to Nashville to see it, where our other friend Sam Girwarnauth currently works and lives.  At first I vacillated, because August 21 was pretty close to school starting, and my wife Kristin was already working and would not be able to come with me.  Finally, about a week before the TSE, I decided to go, and made plans.  Starting early on Saturday morning, August 19, I made the 3.5 hour drive from Shelby Township, Michigan to Goshen, Indiana, where Mike lives.  Next morning we took Mike’s Toyota Camry the rest of the way down to Nashville, where we met up with Sam and Brittany and stayed the night.  I lugged along my banjo, my 6-inch  Dobsonian reflector telescope, and some non-essentials like food and clothing.

We rose early on August 21 and began planning.  The previous night was spent catching up on Sam’s back balcony, but now it was time for business.  After searching around online for a while, we found that the arc of totality would pass pretty closely to Gallatin, TN, which was about an hour’s drive northeast from Nashville, just north of the Cumberland River.  At 9:41am I texted Kristin to let her know we were doing our eclipse planning.  Using Google Maps, we located a tiny spit of land jutting south from Lock 4 State Park, forming a little peninsula that appeared to be mostly free of trees and was quite out of the way.  We chose that as our Plan A, and Mike and I planned to head back to Goshen immediately after the eclipse.  So we packed up our gear into the cars, including some snacks and water.  We left around 10am, and the TSE was scheduled to begin at 11:59am, just barely enough time to get there and set up.

As soon as we hit the highway we knew traffic would be an issue.  Sam and I began discussing contingency plans: If the TSE began while we were in traffic, we would simply pull off and set up shop wherever we were.  Not ideal, but acceptable as a last resort.  Thankfully we got through to Gallatin and swung into Lock 4 State Park at just about 11am.  As we slowly tooled into the park, we were encouraged: although there were many people here, the park was large enough to rarify the crowd, so that people were pretty spread out. 

We probably snagged two of the last parking spaces on the grass, one adjacent to the other.  There was plenty of open grassy space in the sun, but also enough trees that we could get some shade if we needed it.  Already it was around 85 degrees, and we were hot.  Cicadas buzzed as we walked down to the southern tip of the park to prospect the lay of the land and decide if we could find an acceptable space.  On our way, we weaved between rows of cars parked along the service road, and a wide diversity of eclipse-seekers milled about.  Some of them had set up tents or claimed the handful of pavilions that dotted the park.  There must have been 100 telescopes with solar filters already set up, their operators sitting at the ready.  But I only saw refractor telescopes, not a single reflector like mine.  The service road was elevated, above the rest of the park, and it terminated at the park’s southern tip with a needle-eye loop with a grassy teardrop-shaped area in the middle.  South of the loop the grass sloped gently to a small rounded promontory that extended out into the gently flowing river.  Reeds and rushes jutted out of the shallows in scattered tufts, and piles of shrubs and small trees on the water’s edge provided some narrow strips of shade.  Boats blaring Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” trolled along the Cumberland River, and we could also make out a few areas on the river’s far banks were other eclipse-seekers were setting up camp.  Just uphill from where the slope levelled off was an enormous maple that shaded a clump of eclipse seekers.  Downhill from that tree was the place.  It was unclaimed, flat, and had an unobstructed view of the sun.  I told the guys that I thought that was the best place.  We dropped off two folding chairs and some umbrellas, and Mike stayed to stake our claim.

Sam and I marched back to the car to grab my telescope and our bags of snacks.  The sun was blazing.  By now the temperature had climbed to 95 degrees.  We hauled the equipment down the slope, and I began to put the telescope together and calibrate the spotting scope.  Check out this post for a descriptive explanation of how I prepared for this event.  I gave Mike and Sam each a pair of viewing glasses, the kind with the mirror finish that you can use to look right at the sun.  It was so hot in the sun that I took off my shirt, but the sun on my skin actually made me hotter.  Plus, somehow we had forgotten to pack sunscreen, and I did not need to take that particular souvenir on the 7-hour drive back to Goshen.  (The drive actually lasted 12 hours thanks to traffic.)  By the time we were all set up and ready, it was around 11:15am, and just shy of 100 degrees.  There was a worrying preponderance of towering cumulus clouds, but for now they were staying at bay.

In the hour or so leading up to the beginning of the TSE at 11:59am, the park had the air of a sort of carnival or fairgrounds, except that there was not the slightest trace of commercialism.  There was not one vendor hawking viewing glasses, t-shirts, drinks, snacks, shot glasses, refrigerator magnets, or any of the trappings of modern kitschy consumerism.  There was a single port-a-john near the park’s entrance, which had a permanent line for nearly the whole time we were there.  The joy of the experience was purely the interactions among people and nature, not between them and their possessions.  Some college kids were throwing a Frisbee around, some youngsters were playing in the river, lots of people had brought their dogs, and of course, the amateur astronomers fondled their telescopes.

Once we claimed our territory and I set up the telescope, I saw that there were 6 sunspots visible on the face of the sun.  From left to right there was a fat, dark spot about three times the size of Earth, then a tiny, pale one near it, then a diffuse blurred sunspot nearly four times Earth’s diameter but longer, then a similar one that was tilted a little differently and darker at its center; then near the very right edge of the sun’s disc I could make out a stark spot like the first one, and a jumbled blob of a sunspot about four times the size of Earth and fairly dark.  You can see them below, which was the view through my objective lens at exactly 11:56am, just 3 minutes before the eclipse began.  I kept asking Sam to update me on the time.

And then, with a remarkable slowness, the moon’s edge appeared in my eyepiece.  It was so gradual a movement that I couldn’t perceive it unless I looked away, then back again a minute or two later.  That was when I started furiously snapping pictures.  I had to document this.  My knees got rubbery and my heart raced as a few scattered cheers went up.  I was covered in sheets of sweat.  And still I shot dozens of pictures at a time.

As the minutes wore on, the moon slowly- so slowly- ate up the disc of the sun.  It got easier to gauge its movement by comparing its distance from the sunspots.

It was at around this point that small clusters of eclipse-seekers started to come down to my setup and ask to look through the eyepiece.  My large, black reflector telescope was prominently positioned at the base of the hill, and it had attracted notice even as we lugged it down the slope.  I was more than happy to allow everyone a glance through the telescope, and they were truly wowed by the Dobsonian reflector’s resolution and magnification.  Over the course of the TSE we were probably visited by around 50 people from all over the region, many of them Michiganders, Ohioans, even an Aussie.  There were groups of friends who had road-tripped like us, there were retired folks, there were parents with children, there were newlyweds, and all number of other demographics.  Everyone was extremely friendly and just wanted to enjoy this experience together.  It was possibly the most optimistic, positive, and cynicism-free crowd I’ve ever seen.  An amiable man named Greg from Ohio complimented my setup and invited me to see his.  He had taped one side of eclipse glasses over the aperture of his telescope, and it did a commendable job of filtering the light.  We exchanged pleasantries and I admired his ingenuity.  It was all very exciting.  I enjoyed pointing out the sunspots, and by this time there were gently sloping mountains faintly visible on the moon’s surface.  You might just be able to spot them in the photo below, along the moon’s upper edge.  All the same, I was a little worried about the cumulous clouds piling up.  Totality would last only 2 minutes and 37 seconds, and the passage of a single dark cloud at the wrong moment could dash the whole thing.  The moon slid onward.

It was still extremely warm, but the temperature had dropped to perhaps around 90 degrees.  Several times Mike and Sam asked if I wanted a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but I declined because of my excitement.  I was also worried that the food would distract me from photographic opportunities, and that I would miss unacceptable spans of the TSE’s duration.  Not to mention, PB&J sandwiches are sticky, and I was working with lenses that I could not afford to smear up with peanut oil and jelly residues.

By 12:50pm it was noticeably darker and cooler, although you still couldn’t safely look up at the sun.  The sliver of the sun’s disc that peeked out from behind the moon seemed just as bright as a full sun, and it was blinding to look at without eye protection.  Every minute it got cooler and darker.  A comfortable, gentle breeze picked up. 

The strange thing about this moment was that although the light began to fade away- as you might expect on a clear summer evening just after sundown- the source of the light was still very high.  The sun cast sharply-outlined shadows beneath us, but the shadows took on the same eerie appearance of shadows formed by moonlight.  The buzz of cicadas faded a little, and then they were replaced by the stridulation of crickets. 

Totality was predicted to start at 1:27pm and last exactly 2 minutes and 37 seconds at our location.  By about 1:20 my camera began to have trouble with the exposure and focus, and my photos started turning out like the one below.  Notice how it is washed out and a little blurry at the edges. 

About 5 minutes before totality, I put away the camera and just tried to enjoy the moment.  I looked at the tiny crescent of sun through my NASA-approved solar glasses and also enjoyed the coolness, the breeze, and the ever-dimming sky.  It had cooled by about 20 degrees.  The piles of cumulous clouds were taking on a twilight purple tinged with cool blue, but it looked as though they would hold off for totality.  The cicadas and birds had fallen asleep.  It was eerily dark and cool.  My heart beat so fast it hurt my chest.  My knees were shaking.  I was excited and somehow frightened.  It was too many conflicting emotions for my head to make sense out of.  The collective anticipation was so thick that it asserted itself as its own electric presence in the air, like a silent, thrumming music that made your feet and fingers tingle, made your stomach flutter.  It dimmed and dimmed.  It was dreadful.

And then, at 1:27pm local time, totality occurred.  The tiny smidgen of sun on the far right edge of the disc was extinguished with a startling suddenness, and a horrible, haunting darkness swept across the park.  It was the visual equivalent of a thunderclap.  The crowd cheered, wild and uninhibited.  The sky was a glistening, glowing lavender hue; the planets Venus and Mercury popped into existence, along with a scattering of stars.  All 360 degrees of the horizon became a red and orange sunset, with the towering clouds purple and dark.  Then the crowd hushed into gasps and whispers.  Boats on the lake honked their foghorns.  I heard the staccato report of fireworks.

And in the sky, where the disc of the sun had been, was the total solar eclipse.  The most acute superlatives cannot grasp the horrible beauty of this sublime event.  As I gazed, transfixed by the awful, haunting object in the sky, I was utterly dumbfounded.  It was at once smaller than I expected and also shockingly more real.  The disc of the moon was the blackest thing I had ever seen.  No ink, no dark well, no black coal, no night sky, no image can ever approach the immaculate, pure black of that horrifying object’s color.  It was almost hard to imagine that there had ever been light there.  And surrounding this awful black disk was a glaring, white, fiery mist- the fabled corona.  It spewed out from the black disc in three main regions: one spire on the lower left, one on the upper right, and another on the lower right.  They did not appear to move and shift as I expected.  The corona’s combined width was at least three times that of the black disc, which meant it must be millions of miles across.  Even after the moon had devoured the sun, this pure white crown of plasma was bright enough to illuminate the sky, although it could not produce shadows because the light was too diffuse.

I could barely take my eyes off of this event, but I managed to get out my camera and start stupidly narrating a hastily improvised video.  The only words I came up with to describe it at the time were “Too bizarre” and “Too strange.”  And that was true, but the video fails to resolve the black disc of the moon, which is extremely disappointing.  Mike and Sam’s cameras also wouldn’t resolve the disc, so all we have to remember that transcendent image is our minds and this blog post.  I’ve done a little photographic manipulation to simulate exactly what it looked like.  Alas, although this is an excellent simulation, it is not the same.

What words could best encapsulate this experience?  Exciting, dreadful, joyous, sublime, horrible, haunting, heavenly, divine, hellish, frightening, awe-inspiring, awful, wonderful, beautiful, terrifying, magnificent.  Although appropriate, even these words cannot quite capture the feeling of the total solar eclipse as viewed from Gallatin, Tennessee at 1:27pm on August 21, 2017.

157 seconds passed between the start of totality and its end.  As I continued to shoot video and snap pictures, the crowd began to cheer again.  The disc of the sun appeared on the other side, and with the suddenness of flicking on a kitchen light, our shadows reappeared and the park glowed under the sun’s illuminating rays.  The crowd continued to cheer against the renewed backdrop of foghorns and the pop of fireworks.  At 1:47pm I texted Kristin to tell her “It was indescribable!”  I had been sending her photographs from my telescope for the last hour or so.  My hands were still shivering.

Over the next hour and a half, the crowd cleared out, but the guys and I stuck around so I could capture the rest of the eclipse through the telescope.  As the light and heat grew, I again became drenched in sweat.  The angle of the sun had changed significantly since the beginning of the eclipse, and because it was now shining directly on my telescope’s eyepiece, more and more aberrations and blur worked their way into the photographs.  Its heat and light were beating on the left side of my neck, which would later turn crispy and red with a mild sunburn.

Finally, thankfully, the moon ended its futile 175-minute assault against the sun and eased out from in front of its disc.  I snapped a few more shots and fell to my knees in utter exhaustion.  I claimed the rest of our dwindling supply of water- rightfully by my estimation- as Sam and Mike helped haul the telescope and other materials into the car.  We said our goodbyes with hugs and pats on the back.  It had been an absolutely incredible experience and a fun journey with my two best friends.  As I pored over my photographs and began weeding out the bad ones, Mike drove us out of Lock 4 State Park, and we headed north for Goshen, Indiana.

The trip back north was bad and required our skillful avoidance of heavy traffic spots.  It was all the eclipse-seekers trying to race each other home.  We skirted Louisville and Elizabethtown- two central hubs which Google Maps reported were choked for miles around- and managed to circumvent the worst of it.  Out of our twelve total hours of travel between Gallatin and Goshen, a full five hours were spent sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

And it was worth every second.

Here's an excellent shot that my friend Sam Girwarnauth was able to take with his camera.  Still, the photograph just doesn't do the experience justice.