Back in 2017, so many people that I cared about (family, friends, peers) missed out on the total eclipse. It killed me inside to hear them say "Atlanta got 95% of the eclipse so that was good enough for me". They totally missed it. But were ignorant of what they missed out on.
In an effort to convince those people to see the 2024 total solar eclipse, I wrote a little piece describing the event (based on my 2017 experience). My hope is that it opens up their emotions and pushes them to consider making the effort. Sharing my first draft below...
An hour before the eclipse you don't notice any difference. You look at the sun through a solar filter and pinhole projection and see that the moon is indeed making its way across. It looks kind of cool, but, meh...
About 5-10 minutes before totality, things start looking weird. It's getting darker. You feel like you have sepia filters over your eyes. Contrast lessens. Someone is closing the window blinds...
About 1-5 minutes before totality, the sky starts to transition from twilight to dark. Stars and constellations shine. Planets, too, like Mercury and Venus. Birds, confused, start chirping their morning and evening songs. You feel like something big is about to happen.
Then, TOTALITY. The Moon and Sun combine and suddenly you are thrust into night. You look up and see an ominous black orb suspended in the sky. The blackness of the orb feels blacker than the sky because it is surrounded by a whispy, bright halo with tendrils that stretch out so far to make the Sun/Moon appear four times their normal size. Eerily, it looks just like an eyeball. You have never felt more small or humbled. Some of the people around you (ones that seemed reserved leading up to the eclipse) make primal yelps. Your friend next to you (the one that doesn't believe in God) says "Oh my God." You feel frozen but you're shaking. You're not sure how to react so you yell out with everyone else. You lose all sense of your modern self; genes buried deep inside you from a million years ago reactivate and you devolve back into a Homo Erectus.
You spot little bits of red and pink along the edges of the Sun/Moon: these are solar prominences which are more fully appreciated with a pair of binoculars or telescope. You pull up your binoculars and you're blown away by the details you're seeing, just right there, with your own eyes. You're used to the Sun being a featureless, bright flashlight, one that you never look at directly, but now you've been given the opportunity to glimpse behind the curtain and see just how dynamic and active it is. That whispy halo is the Sun's corona; it contains ripples in a pond of light which fades off to infinity where the light from other stars take over. All along the perimeter of the Sun/Moon, you see the prominences. They're deep and bright, red and pink. Some appear as spots between lunar mountains while others make grand arcs following local trails of magnetism. Each prominence is different. Some are concentrated, like a necklace of beads, while others are like miniature whisps the size of Earth.
At your location, totality lasts for four minutes, an amount of time that feels forever during the event but a blink afterward.
Suddenly, the Moon's shadow retreats and you are thrown back into the light of the Sun. It feels as if you've just been jolted awake from a deep, immersive dream where you were part of some ancient Aztec ritual. Now you find yourself standing under the lamp of the Sun, bemused, as if naked in a hospital hallway with no memory of how you got there. Like the child from the viral video you think "Is this real life?" You spend the next six years pondering that, until the next total eclipse teases the opportunity to find out.