Anyone see the Solar Eclipse?

askolover · Aug 21, 2017

Nashville and surrounding areas were having one more PARTY today! It was weird seeing the darkness and streetlights coming on in the middle of the day, very eerie.

cornutt · Aug 21, 2017

Yeah, I drove to Pikeville, in eastern Tennessee, which was near the center of the totality path. Very strange experience. Got dark really fast just before totality. Streetlights came on and crickets were chirping. Birds were very confused afterwards.

supersuds · Aug 22, 2017

I'm just a few miles northeast of the "totality" path, but we did have 99.9% coverage. It was quite easy to pick out Venus and Jupiter in the dark skies -- not that I'd normally know, but there was a diagram in the paper that showed where they'd be!

Like the Kentucky Derby, it was a lot of buildup for something that was over in two minutes. I would not want to build a vacation around an eclipse, but it was neat to see.

tolivac · Aug 22, 2017

No didn't watch it-was sleeping--Did wake up to go pee-noticed that it was darker then usual outside.I work mid shift so sleep during the day.At least I don't have any eye damage worries!

askolover · Aug 22, 2017

Normally I would have been sleeping too, but I scheduled myself to be off to see it and I set the alarm to get me up earlier than normal.

mark_wpduet · Aug 22, 2017

95%

Here in Lexington. It was so cool (literally)
At about noon it was so freaking hot I was outside in a chair and the sun was beating down. About 115 pm I went back outside and noticed that the sun didn't feel nearly as intense on my skin and it just kept getting cooler and more comfortable as each minute passed...Everything kept getting dimmer and dimmer but never totally dark. But in the middle of a very hot afternoon at 230 pm when it was at its max, it was so comfortable feeling. Inside my house, the light was so dim shining through the windows that you felt like a major thunderstorm was around the corner.

DADoES · Aug 22, 2017

RJ said it played some havoc with load control. The generating plant operators didn't know how to predict and react to the effects so some unusual conditions happened for a while.

tomturbomatic · Aug 22, 2017

From the Washington Post's Energy 202 blog



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On Monday, Mother Nature, seemingly unprompted, provided a test of one of the more controversial ideas tossed around by the energy and environmental staff installed by President Trump.

Here's their question: Do recent changes to way power is generated in the United States — namely, more solar and wind, less coal and nuclear — mean the nation's grid operators will not have enough power plants to meet electricity needs when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining?

Right now, the Energy Department is finalizing an overdue study asking whether the national electric grid can handle the lost of so-called “baseload” power plants as older coal and nuclear facilities are priced out of the electricity market by cheaper renewables.

“As the utility sector prepares for the short-term impact of a solar eclipse, a much larger problem looms for solar advocates — the diminishing value of intermittent solar as a reliable source of electricity,” said Thomas Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research and a member of Trump’s transition team for energy.

The grid reliability study has been delayed since June, though Shaylyn Hynes, a press officer at the Energy Department, told me it will be published “soon.”

But the concern over grid reliability got a real-world test on Monday when the moon cast its shadow across the continental United States from Oregon to South Carolina, dampening solar energy generation in the top two states for solar capacity — California and North Carolina.

As thousands of Americans craned their necks skyward to take in the eclipse, grid operators in California didn’t don eclipse glasses but instead focused on the task at hand — working in a windowless room to keep the lights on elsewhere in the Golden State, without even seeing the event firsthand.

The eclipse went off without a hitch for the California Independent System Operator (CAISO), which delivers 80 percent of the electricity in a state that has more solar energy capacity than every other state in the country combined. As predicted, solar energy production dipped across CAISO's grid beginning at 9 a.m. Pacific Standard Time before spiking back up about an hour and a half later. I went to CAISO's headquarters in Folsom, just outside Sacramento, to watch the action.

“Things went really, really well,” Eric Schmitt, vice president of operations at CAISO, said after the eclipse.

dartman · Aug 22, 2017

I was just out of high school a while and was inside getting ready to go to work in Gresham Oregon at our newish built for us family house. I remember watching the parking lot of the Safeway across from our backyard and seeing it get fully dark and the headlights come on of the cars. It was cloudy outside so other then that nothing to see.
I was digging trees at the time
This time I was on a roof repairing a chimney and we watched the light ripple across the shingles of the roofs from the Carona as it got close. It got colder and the light got like late dusk but the color was different. I used my glasses and a peice of flashing to try and see the crescent shape and took very quick glimpses and could sorta see the shape. 79 was total here but cloudy, this one was like 98 percent but other than the cool light ripples and no clouds 79 was better and I'll probably never live to see another.

golittlesport · Aug 25, 2017

it was a cloudy morning in So Cal

and we only had about 70% coverage, but it was very cool the way the shadows were falling low in our yard - the light was noticeably different. I stepped outside and aimed my phone at the sun without actually looking at it and lucked out, capturing this photo.

leefree · Aug 25, 2017

Chasing totality

I was just outside of Salem, Oregon in path of totality. Almost stayed in Hillsboro with family but figured I had come 800 miles from LA, may as well make the effort. SO GLAD I did. It was truly amazing to look at the sun, during totality, without glasses. Hillsboro had 99% but could not take off eclipse glasses. It did darken significantly for them though (streetlights came on). Being in totality was surreal. A bright still summer day got cold, windy and dark and we could see stars! I'm hooked and can't wait for the next one!

amyofescobar · Aug 27, 2017

Man, we almost didn't go see it because we were scared of traffic, but it turned out to be totally fine. We live 1.5 hr away from totality. It really was great. Pictures dont really convey how silver shiny the whole thing is. It's not diffused, its piercingly white.

Here's a wee bit of (crappy) footage, we were 30 min north of Madras OR
https://www.periscope.tv/AmyofEscobar/1LyxBEwkzdyJN?

Got to see the mountains light up pink!

amyofescobar · Aug 27, 2017

Skip to like 8:20

Anyone see the Solar Eclipse?

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