Accuweather's look ahead to the 2024 Total Eclipse across North America

April 6, 2023 6:41 PM

We're one year away from the solar eclipse that will cut a wide swath across the United States
posted by wowenthusiast (65 comments total)

Yeah, I've been doing some idle planning for the last few days. The most insane analysis of the 2024 track is here at Eclipsophile.

I hear rumors that The Planetary Society will be hosting a big event in Kerrville TX, similar to the one that they did on Carbondale IL in 2017. I was at the latter, and I'm sorry to report that an entire football stadium full of science nerds was ready and waitng and ... we got struck by a wayward cloud. It really sucked. And now off to West Texas I go :)
posted by intermod at 7:18 PM on April 6, 2023 [12 favorites]

We went to the totality zone for the last big one, and it was pretty cool. I don't know how far I'd travel to get that experience again, but maybe? Thanks for the reminder about this.
posted by hippybear at 7:29 PM on April 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

For the last one we drove from Boston to Nashville over a couple days and had a break in the clouds for the whole thing. It was a bucket list item and I'm going to do whatever I can to see the 2024 one. The question is do I take my chances with Vermont in April, which is close and where I have a lot of friends, or do I drive to Texas or somewhere where I have a better chance of getting nicer weather.

It was an absolutely amazing thing to see.
posted by bondcliff at 7:35 PM on April 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Intermod, I was in Carbondale too for the eclipse!

Bummer about the stray cloud at the end, but at least the university put on a great show and science presentation beforehand. I also got to see Marian Call perform live, and take a walk to the Buckminster Fuller geodesic house that was nearby.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 7:52 PM on April 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

that eclipsophile analysis is serious!
posted by lalochezia at 7:54 PM on April 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

We were visiting Chicago from Minneapolis and made a long day trip down state. Our target was Carbondale, but we stopped 25 miles north of Carbondale on US-51 when we hit a tiny town called Sunfield. It seemed apropos.

Laid right there on the grass with locals and others who stopped short of the Carbondale goal. First time I'd ever seen a full eclipse, and it was glorious.
posted by Ickster at 8:12 PM on April 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

Intermod, Kerrville is in the beautiful Hill Country of Texas on the Edwards Plateau. Totality won't even be visible in West Texas. I live in the DFW area, so it'll go right over my house! Hopefully a clear day, April is thunderstorm and tornado season here.
posted by Grumpy old geek at 8:13 PM on April 6, 2023

I was also in Carbondale but on the north end of town and the cloud passed over just in time. It was truly amazing.

My mom and I have a date for next year near Grand Prairie, TX. Weather there this week is pretty cloudy...
posted by muddgirl at 8:13 PM on April 6, 2023

I don't know how far I'd travel to get that experience again,

Looks like it’s coming to my doorstep. Such planning!

Looking at the map of the totality path of 2017 and 2024, looks like Paducah is the place to be this decade.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 8:15 PM on April 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Prepare your equipment in advance. Buy some shoes, throw them away, and keep the shoebox. Everyone knows you can't observe an eclipse with the naked eye. Only a fuckwit would do that.
posted by adept256 at 8:32 PM on April 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

Or... get the (if it's like last time) myriad free eclipse observing glasses that will be offered? I had like 10 pair before the event and gave most of them away, save what we needed.

My Eclipse Moment was that I was looking at the forming eclipse through my glasses... and it was getting close to becoming full, and right as it went all "diamond ring" I moved my head down to take off the eclipse glasses and we were up high on a hillside and for what was less than a second, I watched a shadow flee away from me across the landscape beneath me and up the next hillside while I moved my head back up and looked at the full eclipse with my naked eyes, when it was finally safe to do so.

It wasn't until much later, during the drive home, that I realized I'd literally seen the edge of the shadow of the moon moving over the face of the earth.
posted by hippybear at 8:37 PM on April 6, 2023 [21 favorites]

Where I work is run and staffed by science/space nerds, and we actually got a couple of days off to travel to Madras to the Solartown camp. As the eclipse started, I was kind of gritting my teeth bracing for a lot of excited cheering, as I really wanted to quietly watch, and not be distracted. I needn’t have worried, though, as a hushed, unprompted silence lasted for the entire 3 or so minutes, including babies, dogs, little kids, everything. I’d go to see another one, but it feels like it will be hard to top. Extremely glad I saw one under such perfect conditions.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 8:48 PM on April 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

i still have my shade 14 welding goggles.
posted by Clowder of bats at 8:49 PM on April 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

I have been planning to go to Texas, but the problem becomes where to stay and how long after to stay put in order to give traffic a way to calm down. Most places I have looked at so far, you can’t book quite yet...

I drove with a friend from DC to South Carolina last time, camping at lake Marion. We were almost alone at a crawfish pond for totality, and it was amazing. I am doing whatever I can to see it again.
posted by gemmy at 9:13 PM on April 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Last time I drove up to Wyoming with very little planning my dog in tow. Tried to get into a state park to camp, got directed out by rangers to sleep in the local high school's gym. Noped on that, remembering I'd seen that a good sized chunk of land adjacent to the state park and up against a river was all BLM land. Navigated my way through some back roads that turned to dirt road that turned to no more road, with plenty of other would be campers pulled off. Oriented myself as best I could, saw a track out to a large bluff over the river. Followed it until I couldn't see anyone else camping, which happened to be on top of this awesome cliff. Set up camp with this as the view 20 feet from my tent. Two other couples climbed up the next morning for the eclipse but we all spread out far enough to not even be in each other's sight lines. My dog didn't seem to care a whit about the eclipse, but it was one of the best experiences of my life.

Spouse and I booked a tiny rental on the Mexican coast for next year, and I hope to get out in a sea kayak or something.

Edit: dog tax, RIP to a good girl.
posted by deludingmyself at 9:21 PM on April 6, 2023 [9 favorites]

The good part: The path is centered over my sister's house.

The bad parts: Nine hour drive, every room is already booked.

Good part: She'll have a great view, she lives on a hilltop in the sticks.

Bad part: I know what weather is like in upstate NY in April.

The worst part: If I plan to go, that will guarantee clouds and rain. I'm not saying I control the weather, but...
posted by Marky at 9:30 PM on April 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

Looking at the map of the totality path of 2017 and 2024, looks like Paducah is the place to be this decade.

We have family in Paducah so there’s rumblings of heading that way!
posted by mochapickle at 9:34 PM on April 6, 2023

Intermod, Kerrville is in the beautiful Hill Country of Texas on the Edwards Plateau.

Ah yes, my apologies to West Texans for my New Yorker's view of the world. West Texas to me means anything west of San Antonio, and yes I know that's wrong :) But I also misspoke because the trip I have in mind right now is to approach the eclipse path from the west -- start in El Paso and drive all around actual west Texas. After that I should have more respect for the region.

Or... get the (if it's like last time) myriad free eclipse observing glasses that will be offered? I had like 10 pair before the event and gave most of them away, save what we needed.

Thanks to help from a fellow STEM outreach friend, I gave away about 500 pairs.

It makes me sad when people say they saw 99% totality and think they've seen a total solar eclipse.
posted by intermod at 9:38 PM on April 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

I have eclipse glasses saved from years ago!
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:40 PM on April 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

HEAVY SIGH. I don't know if anyone here was working at a public library in 2017, but someone had a bright idea to send libraries small stocks of eclipse glasses, then announce it to the media that we had them. Not the worst idea, except the eclipse went weirdly viral, and several news agencies picked up the story that free eclipse glasses were to be had at your local public library...without fact checking if we actually had any. So we had people calling and showing up and having screaming freak out fits that we ran out of them a month ago when the original giveaway happened.
posted by blnkfrnk at 9:52 PM on April 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

Prepare your equipment in advance. Buy some shoes, throw them away, and keep the shoebox. Everyone knows you can't observe an eclipse with the naked eye. Only a fuckwit would do that.

You don't even need a pinhole camera, welding goggles or eclipse glasses.

You can make a pinhole camera with your fingertips and thumbs pressed together. Or use two pieces of paper with a pinhole in one sheet and hold them up in the air. Or stand under a tree and hold out a sheet of white paper and watch the shadows. (Since I'm that kind of nerd at the last one I handed out a lot of improvised squares of notebook paper with holes punched in them with the awl on my multitool

Honestly just watching the shadows under a tree or any structure like a trellis or something that casts a complicated shadow is even weirder and cooler to me than watching an isolated image directly.

Those kinds of perfect isolated images of the occlusion are really easy to find online and have way more detail than you can see with your naked eyes, even with eclipse glasses, unless you already happen to have a habit and the gear for solar photography or something.

But paying attention to my surroundings was way more interesting to me than trying to observe the eclipse directly because things get super weird. The light changes a lot, and it's like reality has a weird video effect or rotoscoping effect as every shadow edge and corner gets distorted and things just start looking surreal a little like the animation from the movie of A Scanner Darkly. Things just don't look right or normal and it's *everywhere* all around you when the eclipse is happening.

Then there's the temperature changes and stuff like birds freaking out.

BTW, you can also use eclipse glasses to look at the sun without an eclipse and see sunspots and stuff.

I've also put them over the end of small binoculars, which yeah is sketchy/dangerous but they were taped on there pretty good. But it was really cool to be able to directly look at huge sun spots with a little magnification
posted by loquacious at 10:23 PM on April 6, 2023 [7 favorites]

Wasn't expecting much when I camped in oregon to see it in 2017. Turned out to be a near life-altering experience. Mazatlan, here I come.
posted by mr_roboto at 11:08 PM on April 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

2017 the path of totality went right over my aunt's house north of Kansas City. Had a beautiful view as the sun became smaller and smaller, then not even 15 seconds before totality...the clouds moved in, and it started storming shortly therafter :( I did get some cool photos, and seeing the umbra sweep across the neighborhood was kind of neat, so not a total loss I guess.

Of course this next one has to be the one year I'm not in the US, ugh. Considering whether it's worth it to travel back, we have family in Illinois so could try Carbondale, but clouds are a real risk. Not to mention rooms aren't even available for booking yet, from what I've seen.
posted by photo guy at 11:48 PM on April 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

On 29 June 1927, three million people went to the north of England to see 25 seconds of total eclipse. Virginia Woolf described the event in her diary.

Now I must sketch out the Eclipse.
[…]
it was early yet. We had to wait, stamping to keep warm, Leonard kept looking at his watch. Four great red setters came leaping over the moor. There were sheep feeding behind us. There were thin places in the cloud, and some complete holes. The question was whether the sun would show through a cloud or through one of these hollow places when the time came. We began to get anxious. We saw rays coming through the bottom of the clouds. Then, for a moment, we saw the sun, sweeping - it seemed to be sailing at a great pace and clear in a gap; we had out our smoked glasses; we saw it crescent, burning red; next moment it had sailed fast into the cloud again; only the red streamers came from it; then only a golden haze, such as one has often seen. The moments were passing. We thought we were cheated; we looked at the sheep; they showed no fear; the setters were racing round; everyone was standing in long lines, rather dignified, looking out. I thought how we were like very old people, in the birth of the world - druids on Stonehenge. At the back of us were great blue spaces in the cloud. But now the colour was going out. The clouds were turning pale; a reddish black colour. Down in the valley it was an extraordinary scrumble of red and black; there was the one light burning; all was cloud down there, and very beautiful, so delicately tinted. The 24 seconds were passing. Then one looked back again at the blue: and rapidly, very very quickly, all the colours faded; it became darker and darker as at the beginning of a violent storm; the light sank and sank; we kept saying this is the shadow; and we thought now it is over - this is one shadow; when suddenly the light went out. We had fallen. It was extinct. There was no colour. The earth was dead. That was the astonishing moment: and the next when as if a ball had rebounded, the cloud took colour on itself again; and so the light came back. I had very strongly the feeling as the light went out of some vast obeisance; something kneeling down and suddenly raised up when the colours came. They came back astonishingly lightly and quickly and beautifully in the valley and over the hills, at first with a glittering and aetheriality. The colour for some moments was of the most lovely kind - fresh, various - here blue, and there brown: all new colours, as if washed over and repainted. It was like recovery. We had been much worse than we had expected. We had seen the world dead. We were bitterly cold. I should say that the cold had increased as the light went down. One felt very livid. Then - it was all over till 1999.

posted by jamjam at 12:29 AM on April 7, 2023 [10 favorites]

Looks like it doesn't quite make it over Toronto but we could make a day trip to Fort Erie and be right under the path of it. Just have to hope it isn't cloudy!
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 2:33 AM on April 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

I am so stoked for this eclipse. I’ve never been able to witness a total eclipse in my entire life, and this one rolls straight over my house! My excitement is tempered, though, by the reality of April weather in Indiana. Today, things are looking nice and clear. But, a few days ago, we had torrential rains, wind, and killer tornadoes. I guess I’ll just cross my fingers and hope.
posted by Thorzdad at 3:02 AM on April 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

Time and Date has a nice overview of upcoming eclipses, including the total solar eclipse which will occur in Western Australia in 2 weeks.

Europe has to wait until 2026.
posted by vacapinta at 3:10 AM on April 7, 2023

Ooh, thanks for this - I remember that I'd thought about a couple days' vacation up to a spot in New York where I could see this. New York City gets a decent partial eclipse, but I want the full monty.

On an older blog I had back in 2017 I talked about watching the eclipse out on the sidewalk in Midtown. I actually had more fun watching other people get their minds blown.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:17 AM on April 7, 2023

Bad part: I know what weather is like in upstate NY in April.

As a resident of metro Buffalo, smack in the middle of the totality zone, I'm very much looking forward to watching the bright spot in the overcast get dark for a couple of minutes.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:22 AM on April 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

Avert Your Eyes: Eclipse Viewing Taboo in Navajo and Other Cultures. I wish I’d known this in 2017. I traveled to the path, and it upended my life.
posted by anshuman at 4:29 AM on April 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Drove from Chicago to Nashville. Was easily one of the top experiences in my life. I still get chills thinking about it. We all plan to do this again. Just gotta watch the weather and hope for no storms!

You know the photos of an eclipse, showing the wavy bands of light/gas emanating from the sun with the moon blocking it? Turns out, those cover nearly the entire sky! I had no idea. We were in a big public park. The temp dropped noticeably (it was hot that day, summer in Nashville). Crickets started chirping. Flocks of pigeons flew up to roost in a big building in the park like it was night time. The entire 360 degree surrounding horizon turned orange like sunset in the middle of the day. The park was full of other eclipse watchers and a bunch of interested college kids. It was a festival atmosphere.

I highly recommend checking it out if you can do so.
posted by SoberHighland at 4:36 AM on April 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

I knew that Carbondale was going to be swamped, so I went to nearby Marion and saw it. It was really something... as was the drive back, since the interstate was packed. Still worth it, still on the fence about traveling to see this one, but I've still got the glasses, damnit.
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:41 AM on April 7, 2023

Quick recommendation: My brother procured some eclipse-safe sheets of plastic to view it through. I recommend those. They were about the size of a sheet of notebook paper, so you could hold them different distances from your face. Was more comfortable viewing that way compared to the glasses we had.

Oh yeah, regarding the traffic: We had driven so far we stayed in a hotel in Nashville that night. I very highly recommend a hotel, as traffic everywhere after the event was bananas. I can't imagine how bad the highways were.
posted by SoberHighland at 4:41 AM on April 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

I saw the 2017 eclipse from Broken Bow, Nebraska. Planned in advance a bit, drove down from Minneapolis the day before, had a motel room booked in Lincoln several months in advance.

Weather watching was critical, as was being flexible. It's like storm chasing, except you need to drive away from the clouds instead of towards them.

Viewing in central Nebraska was near perfect. Grand Island got a great show--a friend of mine was there--but the official eclipse-viewing events were mobbed with traffic, a lot of it being cars with Minnesota or Colorado plates. I checked the weather first thing in the morning when I woke up, which told me I needed to drive further west. The eclipse itself was between 1:00 and 2:00 in the afternoon. Lincoln was clouded over during the eclipse according to the news when I got back, and friends of mine who drove to the Kansas City area said they got rained out.

Grand Island probably saw its population double or triple in the middle of the day, but by the late afternoon the traffic was gone and it was back to normal. Note that Grand Island is a main stop on I-80. Once I was off the interstate, driving through rural Nebraska just before the eclipse was no different than any other day, really.

Considerations if you're planning for this:

Don't wait to book a room, do it as soon as you think you can. It won't be as crazy as news reports predict, but better safe than sorry. If you need a rental car, I'd book that relatively early, too.

Print out a map or two from online sources with maps of the eclipse path that have decent, zoomed-in detail. The most important info is to see state and county roads against the eclipse path. If the eclipse path includes the center line where the duration is longest, even better.

Bring a camera, and bring a tripod for stability. Doesn't have to be expensive. I used a little tripod that I could put on a picnic table. You can buy a cheapie solar filter online that has the same stuff in it that eclipse glasses have, or you could just drape eclipse glasses over the lens (but that might be clumsy). People in Broken Bow who used their 2017 phone to take photos were uniformly disappointed--I forwarded copies of my photos to several people in the town, someone from the town paper, and a couple of people who had driven up from Denver. Phone camera quality is probably better today--but you won't get a second chance, so be ready with a regular camera as well, just in case. Oh, and you don't necessarily need the filter during totality, but it will let you take a series of crescent photos before and after--you'll definitely need it then.

Good luck, and enjoy the show! Hope it works out for everyone, and let's cross our fingers for good weather. I have family in south Texas, so I have a headstart in planning for the next ones.
posted by gimonca at 5:00 AM on April 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

I saw the last one in southern Illinois, a bit off the beaten track. I went to a tiny little town on the Ohio river named Golconda, which besides its location close to the middle of the totality track, also tickled my fancy as a reference to the old Vampire: the Masquerade RPG. Being deep into a chunk of national forest, it was incredibly crazy trying to get back out afterward. It wasn't nearly as crowded as the bigger and more popular sites to the west towards Carbondale, but the limited access through the national park made it just as much of a slog.

Being by the river, it was a pleasant place to chill out (I use the word ironically, because it was brutally hot that day), and there was enough nature in the area to experience the truly eerie behavioral disturbance of the birds, which is often commented on.

If you're going for the next one, I do recommend finding a place as far off of the beaten path as you can, and well placed in the track of totality. It will be easier this time! The track passes through more accessible places. And also, the geometry of this eclipse is more favorable, so the path of totality is much wider, and the duration is much longer. You still want to aim towards the center of the track, but you can be further from the center this time and still get a longer totality than the last.
posted by notoriety public at 5:39 AM on April 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

Oh, I forgot to mention, the short period of the eclipse was a brief respite from that brutal heat, which was also remarkable. On a more temperate day, I'm sure it would have brought a feeling of chilliness, but as it was, it merely took the edge off of the furnace.
posted by notoriety public at 5:45 AM on April 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

traffic everywhere after the event was bananas. I can't imagine how bad the highways were.

Quite a few of my photos from the day were of incredibly packed roads! I had a 9hr drive from Madras to Portland, as a lot of the route is single lane traffic, and it was nearly bumper to bumper gridlock for the first 3 to 4, on a brutally hot day with a tiny old Honda Civic with no aircon.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 5:55 AM on April 7, 2023

I saw the the 2017 total eclipse and it was definitely a mind-blowing experience. I had to drive about an hour away to get into the zone of totality, but it was totally worth it. Thanks again to joeyh for giving me and my family a cool place to watch it from! This time I am nowhere near as close to the path of totality, but it just so happens that my brother lives between Dallas and Ft. Worth, which is both in the path of totality and in an area likely to be cloud free! If I can make it out there I may want to drive south to get a longer duration of totality, but the idea of lounging around in his backyard and not having to drive anywhere after it is over is tempting too. And I have a bunch of eclipse glasses left over from 2017 as well.
posted by TedW at 5:59 AM on April 7, 2023

The last eclipse got me as close as I ever expect to get. It was in Vermont, and we didn't get totality, but we got a weird dusk in the middle of the day. Everything got purplish. My shoebox camera did very little for me, but I felt an Atmosphere for sure. If I didn't know what was happening, I might have wondered if I was going to faint from low blood pressure and my vision was graying out. The crickets started chirping, though, and birds were making dusk calls. I wondered if there was room for puzzlement or anxiety in their little heads.
posted by Countess Elena at 6:07 AM on April 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

The mandate of heaven is being withdrawn
posted by indica at 6:42 AM on April 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

I regret not traveling for the last one, but it was partial here in Maine, and clear. I got a pair of eclipse glasses, went to the park, ended up sharing the glasses with lots of people. Quite fun. I want to travel and see this one someplace where it's likely to be clear, but probably not Texas.
posted by theora55 at 7:12 AM on April 7, 2023

I lucked out last time in that our family owned a cabin in Western NC right in the path of the totality. I reserved it 18 months in advance, and everyone still came. It was a really cool experience, even if we had a ton of people crashing in a tiny 2 bedroom cabin.

The only wrinkle was that it was on a Monday, so we needed to get back home to central FL as soon as we could. So we started heading back after totality ended. Our problem is that we were in Western NC, and also happened to be the closest point that was accessible to Atlanta, GA. We got stuck on a 2 lane state highway not moving for hours. At the first intersection we got to after not moving for so long, we intentionally went the long way through South Carolina and it was still traffic hell. It took an 6-8 hours just to get to Atlanta, normally a 2 hour drive.

I had planned to be in Dallas for this one, since my wife has family there, but I doubt that will be happening. It is still a year away, but somehow this one snuck up on me.
posted by Badgermann at 7:14 AM on April 7, 2023

The temp dropped noticeably

I want to emphasize this for people who've never been in a solar eclipse -- if you are taking kids, have their coats at hand. It will be as cold as night-time. You think Well, it can't possibly get that cold that quickly, and you are wrong.
posted by Etrigan at 7:18 AM on April 7, 2023 [8 favorites]

Totality in 2017 passed over my hometown in rural Nebraska (though I think they had clouds). Unfortunately, I had a six week old baby going though the purple crying phase and couldn't make it down there. So, by golly, I'm going to the 2024 event, dragging my 6 year old with me. Texas will be the best bet climatology wise. They still could get clouds, but less likely to have the all day stratus deck than further northeast.
posted by weathergal at 7:18 AM on April 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

I made a cardboard tube viewer for 2017, which I got to use outside in the New York financial district to see the partial.

I am all in on Mazatlán for next year though. I had thought about Buffalo—quite a bit closer!— but the weather is too iffy. And I’ve been meaning to go to Mexico for years.
posted by thecaddy at 7:29 AM on April 7, 2023

Oh sweet. I'm right in the middle of the totality path!
posted by slogger at 7:33 AM on April 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

It looks like Burlington is in the totality path, we've got heaps of friends there, and according to the analysis it has a pretty much coin-toss likelihood of not being clouded over. If it is clouded over, at least we get to be in a place we like and see friends. I would like to book right now, but most hotels aren't booking that far out yet. (I know because I just tried!)
posted by rednikki at 7:43 AM on April 7, 2023

You don't even need a pinhole camera, welding goggles or eclipse glasses.

You can just stare right at the sun like a boss.
posted by kirkaracha at 8:00 AM on April 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Heads up: a stormchaser photographer I'm acquainted with has already reported that hotels in the Texas totality area have jacked their rates up to something like $800 a night already.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:03 AM on April 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

I drove to Bryson City, NC for it. The town is a tourist place any other time but wow was it packed. I had to drive back to work in Virginia that day and traffic was....bad.

Next year it's near where my uncle lives so less worry about where to stay.

I couldn't find reputable glasses so i bought a welding helmet. Luckily the place I stay had planned ahead and had glasses as well.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 8:18 AM on April 7, 2023

I very highly recommend a hotel, as traffic everywhere after the event was bananas. I can't imagine how bad the highways were

I took a snapshot of Google Maps that evening. It was indeed nuts. But that map is cool. I went from Chicago to St Louis to see it and got back pretty easily. My friends who chose the southeastern route didn't get back until very late in the evening.
posted by JoeZydeco at 8:44 AM on April 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

We drove from eastern WA to eastern OR to see it, camped high up on a mountainside. Our route home was... a fun maze of backroads we had never driven on before because the main highways were clogging up even as we made progress. The drive home took about 2x as long as our drive there, but would have been about 4x as long if we'd tried to stick to the main route.

Also, if you have friends in the eclipse zone, just see if they'll let you set up a tent for a night or two in their yard, if they have one. There's no reason to pay surge pricing hotel room fees.
posted by hippybear at 9:17 AM on April 7, 2023

My brother lives in Austin so I assume I'll stay with him and we'll drive SW to get near the center of the path of totality. He's actually today looking at a rural property for sale that's right on that line.
posted by neuron at 9:32 AM on April 7, 2023

In 2017 we went to Charleston, SC but ended up heading out to the Charles Pinckney National Historic Site instead of staying downtown for the eclipse. There was so much cloud cover that I ended up taking the solar filter off my camera lens and shooting at the clouds, which got me some really dramatic photos as totality approached. There were some brief gaps in the cloud cover so we did, briefly, see totality with our own eyes, and I somehow managed to get a photo of Baily's Beads, which I didn't know until days later when I was processing photos at home. All the wildlife noises died down as the light faded, which was crazy, and then it all came back just as quickly when the light returned.

For 2024 my plan mostly involves having staked an early claim on a guest bedroom at our friends' cottage on Amherst Island. Having shot photos through clouds once I'm prepared to do it again, but I'm also hoping that totality will last long enough that even with cloud cover there would be some useful gaps.
posted by fedward at 10:12 AM on April 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

In case you’re wondering if it’s worth putting in much effort to see this, let me just say that experiencing the 2017 eclipse in central WY is a highlight in my relatively eventful life.
posted by aspersioncast at 10:57 AM on April 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

It will be time for everyone to bust out their kitchen strainers!
posted by aniola at 10:59 AM on April 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Broken Bow, Nebraska, 2017. The tiny dot to the left might be Mercury, not sure.

Diamond ring effect with lens flares.

Eclipse twilight in the Nebraska Sandhills.
posted by gimonca at 1:26 PM on April 7, 2023

Eclipse Twilight In The Nebraska Sandhills is my favorite entry in the Environments sound scapes album series.
posted by hippybear at 1:35 PM on April 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Another vet of Madras 2017 here. We avoided the solarcamp crowds and ended up at Juniper Hills Park, which was sufficiently prepared for the event. Parking, portapotties, food trucks, and a laid back atmosphere. Dealt with the traffic on the way back by turning off at Antelope and looking for the remnants of the Raj Neeshies, but there were no purple-pants wearing people to be found. Or other people for that matter. It's pretty desolate out there.

I'm still wondering where to head for next year's eclipse.
posted by morspin at 2:08 PM on April 7, 2023

Buy glasses now!

I got to spend the last one with dear friends outside of St. Louis - after the odd twilight and sounds of birds preparing for night, when it finally went out, the whole park erupted in whoops of joy. One of the most exhilarating moments of my life, to share that completely naive, completely wondrous, completely delighted experience of self at the exact same time as hundreds of other people.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 2:57 PM on April 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

Watching the total eclipse is nothing at all like the nearby partial eclipse viewing.

This classic Annie Dillard essay was inspiring before my trip to S Illinois:

I turned back to the sun. It was going. The sun was going, and the world was wrong. The grasses were wrong; they were platinum. Their every detail of stem, head, and blade shone lightless and artificially distinct as an art photographer’s platinum print. This color has never been seen on Earth. The hues were metallic; their finish was matte.
...
I had seen a partial eclipse in 1970. A partial eclipse is very interesting. It bears almost no relation to a total eclipse. Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane. Although the one experience precedes the other, it in no way prepares you for it. During a partial eclipse the sky does not darken—not even when 94 percent of the sun is hidden. Nor does the sun, seen colorless through protective devices, seem terribly strange.
posted by jjj606 at 6:57 PM on April 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

I went to southern Illinois, and the skies were very clear.

The closest motel I could get was more than an hour away from the total eclipse band. Even there, when I got up at 6am when the free breakfast was open, the room was packed. I think almost every room was for eclipse watchers.

I parked just outside the zone, and rode a bike trail to Stonefort IL. As it turned out, I could have easily driven there and found lots of parking.

In the town, people had their playlists going: "I'm being followed by a moon shadow", "meet you on the dark side of the moon", etc.

It is astonishing. Very slight effects until right before totality, then the whole world changes.

Traffic afterwards is 100 times worse! Watchers arrive over a 48 hour period, then all leave at once. There were reports of traffic jams on the interstates 100 miles away... I had a reservation nearby, since I was going to do some sightseeing the next day. It was difficult to find any restaurants that weren't out of most food items.
posted by jjj606 at 7:06 PM on April 7, 2023

Bring a camera, and bring a tripod for stability. Doesn't have to be expensive. I used a little tripod that I could put on a picnic table. You can buy a cheapie solar filter online that has the same stuff in it that eclipse glasses have, or you could just drape eclipse glasses over the lens (but that might be clumsy). People in Broken Bow who used their 2017 phone to take photos were uniformly disappointed--I forwarded copies of my photos to several people in the town, someone from the town paper, and a couple of people who had driven up from Denver. Phone camera quality is probably better today--but you won't get a second chance, so be ready with a regular camera as well, just in case. Oh, and you don't necessarily need the filter during totality, but it will let you take a series of crescent photos before and after--you'll definitely need it then.

Be extremely careful with pointing any optics at the sun even with totality, especially if you're using telephoto or telescopic lenses, and you definitely want a proper solar filter on the business end of it pointed at the sun any time the sun is in view.

Like put your solar filter on before aiming it at the sun. If you're not actively photographing or viewing, point your optics away from the sun and don't just leave them there unattended soaking in direct sunlight through your optics.

During the 2017 eclipse I saw a bunch of stories and reports of people who melted and destroyed parts of their cameras and telescopes by trying to use them without solar filters or doing risky things like trying to put makeshift solar filters between the lens and lens body, or, even sillier, on the viewfinders alone so they could try to frame shots through a reflex mirror camera and ending up with damaged sensors or melted parts.

Even the makeshift eclipse glasses over very small spotting binoculars trick I mentioned above is extremely dangerous and I made sure it was light tight with good black gaffers tape and even tested it by holding it above a piece of paper so I could feel how hot it was with my hand before putting anywhere near my face.

This danger increases exponentially with larger lenses like, say, a 300mm zoom or spotting scope.

And I'm honestly not sure how much I would trust inexpensive photo/astro solar filters from Amazon or whatever.

I know just enough about optics to know that it's easy to fake opacity ratings and make something that's fine at limiting and blocking visible light but may be still passing unsafe amounts of infrared or even UV light.
posted by loquacious at 9:06 PM on April 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

> 2017 the path of totality went right over my aunt's house north of Kansas City. Had a beautiful view as the sun became smaller and smaller, then not even 15 seconds before totality...the clouds moved in

Hmm, yeah, we live about 3 miles from totality but ended up driving all the way from Missouri to Wyoming to be as sure as we could of actually seeing it with clear skies.

Well worth it.

Son stayed home because of work, and after a whole morning of being 100% socked in, by pure luck caught the entire eclipse in a 15 minute break in the clouds.

RE: traffic, what we observed last time is that the traffic pre-eclipse was not so bad, as people had been gradually arriving for several days and many hours before the eclipse. Plan to arrive at least a few hours before the eclipse and it probably won't be so bad - the day before and you shouldn't have any trouble. Try to time it just 30 minutes before and - yeah, there will be some traffic.

But AFTER the eclipse, all the people who had been trickling in over 2-3 days, and over several hours that morning, left all at once. A bit like post-game traffic, except over an entire state all at once. So if you left 15 minutes or even an hour after the eclipse was over, you were in a mega traffic jam.

But wait 4 or 5 hours and the traffic wasn't bad. Wait 6 or 8 hours and there was barely noticeable traffic.

We waited until the next morning to leave and there was no out-of-ordinary traffic at all.

Point being: If you insist on arriving at the eclipse 30 minutes beforehand and leaving 15 minutes after, you're going to be in gridlock all right. Arrive the evening before and leave the morning after (or even 6-8 hours after) and there won't be any traffic to speak of.
posted by flug at 9:54 PM on April 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

We saw 80 something % totality on our campus north of Atlanta in 2017, and it was amazing. The sky did get dark, dark enough that we could see Mars suddenly very clearly. The colors did change. We did see bizarre shadows everywhere. I had some instruments out showing measurable changes in temperature and light, and we were documenting everything in NASA's GLOBE app, which also included photographic cloud cover observations (the clouds completely left a few minutes before the eclipse and then returned a few minutes after!). It was also the first time our campus had ever come together for a science event, so that was really cool. We had hundreds of people out on the quad in funny glasses together, all super excited.

All that is to say, if you are not the sort of person who can take time off from work and travel somewhere else to see the eclipse at totality, you can still have an amazing experience seeing not quite totality at home.
posted by hydropsyche at 6:00 AM on April 9, 2023 [1 favorite]