Eclipse

I can truthfully say the eclipse was the most incredible and beautiful event in my entire life.  

Nothing could have even begun to prepare me for the experience I saw and felt.

And I have to say how extremely fortunate we were for our choice of location after witnessing the aftermath of the eclipse upon leaving.  But that is for another post to follow.

Here I am with two fellow travelers, Angela and Will.

As the moon almost reached the point of totally blocking the sun the birds zoomed overhead to their roosting area among the reeds and cattails behind us as they had done every evening while we were camped at Packer Lake in Wyoming a stone's throw from the Nebraska state line.  Then we heard the crickets chirping and the frogs croaking.  To them it was evening.  It never got dark as night.

At our location totality would be 1 minute and 22 seconds in length. I looked at the sun/moon for about 20 seconds then went for the camera to take some stills and video.  I had intended to edit out the jiggly parts where I was searching for the sun on my camera screen but in doing so would have removed the little bit of talking between us three.  I left it as is hopefully capturing the mood between us. We didn't say much for we were pretty much speechless.  At the end you can hear Angela's disbelief that it was over.  It really did seem that time had sped up for that 1 minute and 22 seconds, but this film clip is 1:06 long and I had already looked for those 20 seconds.

This video was shot with my GoPro on a tripod for what started out as capturing the entire nearly 3 hour event from start to finish but I soon realized nothing visible was happening for over half that time.  This is cut down to just 10 minutes of the good stuff then compressed down to 1 minute.  Unfortunately the camera keeps readjusting the exposure for the diminishing light so we don't see the darkening and lightening as how it really looked.

Afterwards we noticed two separate events of a haze appearing over the lake.  It was there then gone.  Minutes later it was there again then disappeared.  This occurred in what to our eyes seemed as full daylight even though the sun was still partially obscured.
I have no pictures of that since it was very faint.  Really spooky.