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I’ve heard the weather wasn’t great for eclipse viewing in much of Southwest and Southside Virginia a week ago. I hope those of you earnestly wanting a better experience to see the 80% to 90% eclipse here will take some solace in having taken one for the team.
The low-pressure trough that brought those clouds moved considerably farther east than had been projected a few days before, clearing much of the totality path from northeast Texas to Ohio far more than looked likely several days prior. That relieved a lot of anxiety for those of us traveling to totality, joining 31 million others who live there.
If you weren’t in the 120-mile-wide totality strip from Texas to Maine on April 8, you’re probably tired of hearing how wonderful it was and how one can only understand how grand a total eclipse is by being there. You may think some of us have already stared at the sun a little too long to think driving hundreds of miles for 4 minutes of early-evening darkness is a rational thing one would do — especially those of us who had just seen the same thing seven years before. Or, perhaps, you really would have liked to be there, but the logistics of life kept you in Virginia. (See reader photos of the eclipse from across Southwest and Southside.)
I get it. Even for us, it felt at times like we were having to move heaven and earth to make this happen for our family, and there was some doubt we would all make it there right up to the last week.
For those who couldn’t make it to totality, those who didn’t but still want to experience a total solar eclipse someday, those who have little or no desire to see it firsthand, those who did make it to totality (this time, 2017, or even somewhere before that) and want to relive it once more, and perhaps those who have some totally unrelated “once-in-a-lifetime” dream-shot trip in mind and might garner some encouragement from our experience, here is the 2024 total eclipse experience for the Myatt family of the Roanoke Valley.
Pre-trip anxiety
Our family’s total eclipse plans in 2024, depending on how you look at it, were about 45 years, seven years or four days in the making.
The seed for my dream of being in both the 2017 and 2024 totality paths was planted in the late 1970s, when as a young boy in northeast Arkansas, I saw the crisscrossing eclipse paths in a public library astronomy book. The crossing point was a couple hundred miles northeast of where I lived, and the second total eclipse path barely included my hometown of Jonesboro. So, right then and there, getting to these two total eclipses became a bucket-list goal for my distant-future self.
The plan to have my family join me for the 2024 eclipse was born shortly after being sufficiently awed on a solo journey to the Aug. 21, 2017, total eclipse in western Kentucky. As I was returning home, I texted a longtime friend in Arkansas that his lake house at Cherokee Village, Arkansas, was right smack in the center of the totality path for the 2024 eclipse, and I wondered if he’d let me land there a few hours with my wife and two sons, so they could witness what I just had. Eventually this morphed into two nights at the lake house for our family and two big grilled meals by our friend. It was extra fun having two families with five kids between us, ages 9 to 17, to experience totality.
But a week before the eclipse, some family illness and unsettled weather had put those plans in some doubt. It appeared on some forecast models Arkansas might be socked in with rain and even severe storms. We developed a Plan B, for the area due north near Lake Erie, just in case the weather went bad for Arkansas or we needed a later departure because of illness. Thoughts of me running to it solo again, or even just having to skip it, floated through our minds.
About five days before the eclipse, both family health concerns and the weather outlook for Arkansas began improving. We decided to cancel our backup reservations in Pennsylvania four days before the eclipse and committed fully to the original Arkansas plan, leaving the next afternoon.
After breaking the long drive across Tennessee into three parts, we arrived at our friends’ lake house at midday on April 7, time enough for me to figure out where the sun would be at eclipse time and a good place for all of us to observe the eclipse. A spot near their boat dock on the lake offered both a view of the sun and an open view across the lake toward a horizon.
My only weather worry was that high-level cirrus clouds might be a little too thick for my liking. Game-day jitters were in full force by Monday morning, and I paced back and forth nervously passing the morning hours before the eclipse, somewhat relieved that the sun was still clearly visible even through a thick patch of cirrus that moved across about mid-morning. Satellite imagery also showed the thicker cirrus clearing out and clearer skies on the way. By about 11:30 a.m., an hour before “first contact” when the moon would begin to nibble at the sun, I knew we would be in good shape for viewing this eclipse.
Stinging start
“There’s a wasp behind you,” my friend told me as we sat in chairs on his wooden deck in the early minutes of the partial phase of the eclipse.
After forgetting about his warning for a couple of minutes, I leaned back in the chair and felt as if I had been poked in the back with a pin. I saw the red wasp fly away, and I knew I had been stung.
What a way to start an eclipse. Fortunately, I’m not allergic to stinging insects — perhaps I took one for the team myself, as others around me could have suffered more — and after a temporary retreat to check it out and get something rubbed on it, I was back in action, more determined than ever to enjoy this second once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Starting at 12:37 p.m. CDT, the moon began moving in front of the sun, steadily reducing the orange disk as viewed through eclipse glasses to a roundish Pac-Man and then to a crescent.
The 2024 eclipse moved at a faster pace than that of 2017, taking an hour and 16 minutes to move from “first contact” or C1, the first nip of the edge of the sun by the dark lunar disk, to C2, when the lunar disk fully covers the sun. The same process took closer to an hour and a half at my western Kentucky viewing site in 2017.
But being near the centerline of a 50-mile wider totality path meant we would be in darkness longer, 4 minutes and 13 seconds compared to the 2 minutes and 36 seconds I experienced in 2017. This is because the moon’s orbit around Earth is elliptical, not round, as is Earth’s orbit around the sun, which means the relative size of the sun and moon in our sky shift ever so slightly. Sometimes the moon appears a little larger or smaller, and, more imperceptibly, the sun also slightly increases or decreases as we see it in the sky. This go-round, the moon was just close enough to block the sun a little more and a little longer than it had seven years before.
We made our way down from the deck to the lakefront viewing spot, with one last call for folks to take care of bathroom needs, about half an hour before totality. Other clusters of people were gathered on the earthen dam across the lake, beside other lakeside docks behind houses, and in a pontoon boat that had pulled into our channel of the 264-acre Lake Thunderbird.
‘Way cooler than I thought’
The appearance of one’s surroundings in the last 20 minutes or so before totality is eerie and otherworldly. Everything around becomes filmy and grainy as the sun’s light is diminished to a sliver. Limbs cast odd fingerlike shadows and crescents of light are projected on the ground between the leaves, though this effect was not as widespread through the underdeveloped early spring foliage of April as it was in the dense greenery of August 2017.
The sky took on a deeper, almost purple, tone, especially looking through the trees off to the southwest, from whence the moon’s shadow was approaching on April 8.
With less than a minute to totality, my older son noted: “It looks like someone’s turning down a dimmer switch.” And, sure enough, the light was visibly diminishing, not the way it goes in and out sharply with clouds, but just like he described, continuously getting dimmer.
Venus became visible to the lower right of the sun even before full totality had been reached. Focusing more on my surroundings than on the sun, I glanced up thinking we had likely reached totality, as dark as it had become around, but there was still a bead of bright sunlight poking around the moon, so I quickly looked back down. “Is it OK to look now?” someone in our group asked. “Not yet,” I replied.
I put the glasses back on — my younger son had wisely kept them on — to watch the last tiny crescent of light slowly extinguish. Then, it was out — it appeared that the sun had disappeared, as seen through the eclipse glasses. Not only do you not have to wear eclipse glasses in totality, but you’re not going to see very much if you do.
Looking up at that point free of the filters revealed the fully eclipsed sun, a black ball with a white rim of light around it. There were audible oohs and aahs, gasps and sighs among my eclipse-viewing party.
My first impression was that the sun’s corona was not as wide and glowing as I had seen in 2017, but tighter around the dark globe, yet more dynamic. Tendrils of light spiked out in various directions, and the bottom part of the dark disk was adorned by a red jewel, actually a tiny, bright red loop — a solar flare! That alone made this a unique experience, as a solar flare is not something I would ever expect to see with my own eye.
No more than 10 seconds or so into totality, the youngest child of our friends shouted: “This is WAY cooler than I thought it would be!”
I had cautioned family and friends with me beforehand that 4 minutes and 13 seconds would seem to pass in 45 seconds, and to be sure to experience the surroundings with their senses and not overly focus on getting photos or strictly on the solar appearance. Perhaps owing to my previous experience when 2½ minutes seemed to last 30 seconds, I made sure to absorb my surroundings as well as the sky above, limiting electronic time to a few photos, and this eclipse darkness seemed to last much longer than it had before.
Looking out across the lake past the earthen dam, which was northeast from us, the distant sky was lit in the kind of yellow and orange hues one would typically see at sunrise. Indeed, this light could be seen through the trees in all directions. That 360-degree sunrise/sunset effect in total eclipses reveals where there is still sunlight outside the umbra of the moon’s shadow.
As expected, the landscape darkened more deeply than my 2017 eclipse experience, to something like it would be an hour or so after sundown. It was just light enough to see people and objects around, and to walk safely, but too dark to make out the details or color of trees surrounding the lake. The landscape and trees all morphed into a silhouetted mass, backlit by the horizon glow. The sky above took on a deep blue cast, some wispy white trails of cirrus clouds rolling across the celestial canvas. In addition to Venus to the lower right of the sun, Jupiter shone to the upper left — Saturn and Mars somewhere to the right were lost behind cirrus clouds or the trees.
“Look, the streetlights are on,” noted my wife, Erica, a copy editor for Cardinal News, looking across the lake channel toward the houses above the shore there.
The southwest sky through the trees began to get lighter, and I looked at my phone to see the time as 1:57 p.m., alerting everyone we had less than a minute of totality left. I had done the same near the halfway point with 2 minutes left, but somehow, we were all caught up in the final moments of darkness and surprised by the first burst of sunlight around the moon ending totality.
Quickly, with some disappointment that totality had ended, we glanced away or put glasses back on. “I wish that could last a lot longer,” one of the younger people in our group said.
Afterglow
The time between C3, when the sun first reappears after totality, to C4, when the last edge of the moon leaves the sun’s disk entirely, is understandably anticlimactic for totality observers. It’s the gradual undoing of everything that seemed so exciting while building up to totality. Roads start clogging up with outbound traffic almost immediately after totality, long before the eclipse is over — regional television and social media showed exactly that happening in Arkansas.
But we didn’t have anywhere to go. One of the first things we did was take a group photo of our two families on the boat dock with the still-darkened northeastern sky — the umbra of the moon’s shadow moving over southeast Missouri and southern Illinois for the second time in seven years — as a background.
We occasionally monitored the stages of the un-eclipsing sun with our glasses and discussed among ourselves what we had just experienced. The younger boys played under the trees in the backyard, still excitedly talking about the eclipse.
Sometime shortly after 3 p.m., I took one final look at the sun, just a small bite taken out by the moon. The eclipse fully ended at 3:13 p.m. local time. Fishing poles came out for the boys to enjoy the rest of the afternoon at the lake.
At some point our discussion turned to future total solar eclipses. For the continental United States, there won’t be another one until 2044, when a northern-latitude path makes it into Montana and North Dakota just before sunset. The next cross-continental total solar eclipse in the U.S. moves from California to Florida on Aug. 12, 2045, and it will have an unusually large amount of time in totality at its core, up to 6 minutes.
Perhaps if all is well with us then, we mused, we can reassemble our families, likely larger with our children’s spouses and our grandchildren, somewhere to watch that eclipse together — perhaps western Arkansas, or somewhere out West.
Four decades forward to two total solar eclipses once seemed like a remote future to a kid in Arkansas; a couple more decades will surely pass faster than we can imagine.
Journalist Kevin Myatt has been writing about weather for 20 years. His weekly column, appearing on Wednesdays, is sponsored by Oakey’s, a family-run, locally owned funeral home with locations throughout the Roanoke Valley.