Eclipse Day Trip

Every so often you have to do something that may seem just a little wacky in order to have an amazing experience. Our most recent wacky adventure was driving down to Newcastle, Utah to sit in an LDS church parking lot in order to be two blocks south of the middle of an annular eclipse. My dad headed up this astronomical foray, bringing along two telescopes fitted with solar filters, several pairs of solar viewing glasses that looked like those 3-D movie glasses, and several postcard-size viewing filters. 

My children and I packed up our car right after stake conference yesterday with food, water, chairs, and some entertainment and met up with my parents and my sister Heather's family at our closest freeway exit. 

We made amazing time getting down to Cedar City, stopping at the hospital for a pit stop (my sister knows where all of the hospitals close to freeways are, and plans family bathroom breaks accordingly. Hey. You're guaranteed clean, nice-smelling bathrooms!). We gassed up at our favorite Maverick station and headed 28 miles out to Newcastle.

We weren't the only ones trying to avoid Kanarraville, which was publicly billed as the best viewing spot. Ha ha. Ours was better. There were just enough people who joined us at the church grounds to be fun, but not too crowded. We took a stroll two blocks north to see the viewing party action going on at the post office. One friendly fellow from California gave us two extra pairs of viewing glasses and showed us another fellow's cool projection setup, where he had projected the image of the sun on something else so you could safely view it. There were three patches of sun spots to see (one of which I thought looked like Hawaii).

The pre-show entertainment included gaming on a cousin's iTouch, eating, and setting up the viewing gear:

This old black dog came to visit us. We never found out who he belonged to, but he just hung around and wagging his tail when you got close to him. His muzzle was silver, and he moved slowly. He stayed for over an hour, but he was gone by the time we packed up. 

 The viewing begins! As the eclipse progressed there was a definite drop in temperature -- noticeably cooler -- and the quality of the light was like sunlight coming through a window screen once the eclipse was getting close to full annular status.

Not sure why everyone looks so serious. We're really having a good time. Really.

I was hoping to capture the dimmed light quality in this picture of Owen and Evan, but my camera just couldn't quite catch it.

 Bronwyn worked on her loom knitting project. She's not sure if it's going to be a very long hat or a short scarf.

The Annular Eclipse Has Begun!

I aimed my camera at the sun during nearly full eclipse stage and looked at it afterwards.

Can you see the crescent-shaped light shapes all over the side of the building? The honey locust tree was acting like one of those pinhole-in-a-paper filters that showed the stage of the eclipse on the side of the building. We're almost to full ring of fire!

 There's the first glimpse of the ring! You could hear everyone whooping excitedly.

A symmetrical ring of fire. What an incredible sight. I took all of these awesome photos with my camera lens aimed through the viewer of one of my dad's telescopes.

We thought with the great speed we had managed to get down to Newcastle that we would get home much earlier than we thought. So did literally thousands of others heading north from the prime viewing areas. We saw many people who had just pulled over to the side of the road to set up their viewing equipment the whole way back to Cedar City. We were in the middle of a very long line of cars. One more stop at the hospital before we headed north. Traffic was very crowded up through Nephi. The worst part of the drive was when I-15 was closed to one lane for several miles south of Nephi. Traffic was stopped dead on the freeway for many miles as cars slowly merged. That added at least 45 minutes to our homeward commute. 


We did have one scare. I think we had too much stuff plugged into our hybrid Escape, because at one point the dashboard said, "Stop safely now," flashed a scary red triangle with an exclamation point in it, and shut off the engine so we were on battery power. Yikes! I grabbed my phone from Bronwyn, who had to hang up on my husband, so I could call ahead to my dad on the road to say we were having car trouble. I pulled over to the shoulder and slowly puttered up the side to where my parents had managed to pull over and shut my car off completely. We unplugged everything that had been plugged in and turned off the AC and the radio. Dad came to our passenger window as I restarted my car, which came right back online. Phew. No further problems, but boy was that a heart-stopper.


Home at midnight meant no unpacking. Guess I'd better go see to that now. It was a fabulous trip! Now I'm all excited for the total eclipse coming up in 2017. I'm bringing more food next time.