August 20, 2017

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On August 20, 2017, most of the extended family met for breakfast at a restaurant with an extensive buffet.  It was great to have so many different choices, and nice to have a bit more time to chat before people needed to head home.

(Madison has a VERY convenient airport, but it is small-ish and doesn't have direct flights to many places.  Milwaukee has a bigger airport, and is about an hour away from Madison, so flying in and out of Milwaukee is often a better choice.  Detroit is one of the places with direct flights to Madison.  It was a piece of cake to pick up our daughter -- who didn't have two days to spend traveling in a car -- and then to return her to the airport, so she could come and go more quickly than we needed to.)



We did not want to be traveling on eclipse day, so we stayed in Madison for another day and night, and went home on the 21st.


The 20th was a cloudy day.  Disappointing, for those who hoped to see as much eclipse as there was in Madison.

Looking south from my sister and brother-in-law's balcony.

I had picked up a bunch of eclipse glasses in Ann Arbor.

The eclipse glasses did an excellent job of seeing through all but the thickest of clouds!  There were times when we couldn't see anything, but, mostly, we could see the outline of the sun very clearly.

There was never totality in Madison, on August 20, 2017, but most of the sun was obscured for a while.This is an imaginative rendition of what we could see at various times, with an indication of the clouds between us and the sun and moon. 

Looking at the world -- not the sun! -- with naked eyes, it never got dark.  The light got funny, I thought, when most of the sun was behind the moon, but it didn't seem darker than a cloudy day might be.

After the eclipse.  Cool clouds......

Another beautiful sunset over Lake Monona.

Those eclipse glasses were like a miracle.  We wouldn't have seen any eclipse without them.

We did try the usual "shine the sun's light through a small hole onto another surface, and look at that surface" method, but couldn't see anything but circles.  No crescents of sunlight.  Our hypothesis is that the clouds made the light more diffuse [less direct], and that made the "small hole" technique useless.

There's going to be another total eclipse over the USA in 6 years -- when the time comes, I urge you to pick up some eclipse glasses at your local science museum (because the ones in the grocery might not actually work....).  Even without totality (and we were hours and hours drive north of the nearest point of totality) we could enjoy this rare opportunity with the eclipse glasses.

THANK YOU to all scientists and engineers and inventors who made these easy cheap eclipse glasses possible!  The last solar eclipse I experienced was nearly 25 years ago, and in those days there was no safe way to look at the eclipse directly.  Luckily that was a clear day and the "small hole" method worked.  I remember looking down at dappled shade on the sidewalk and seeing hundreds of crescent suns..............

This time I saw pictures someone had taken, holding a colander between the sun and something plain and white.  Dozens of tiny crescent suns were visible on the white surface......  I'm going to try to hold that thought and use a colander (as well as eclipse glasses!) for the next eclipse.  There's going to be totality over Toledo, Ohio, about an hour south of us................. 


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