You know the difference between this eclipse and an imminent asteroid strike?

[Red Squirrel]

As cool as it would be to experience totality, there is no way I'd want to deal with the traffic of traveling to an area that has it.

If it happened in my city, then great, I'd check it out from my yard, and I'll just make sure to stay home and have the fridge stocked up ahead of time so I don't need to go out for a few days.  Hopefully it would coincide with time off.  But I'd avoid going anywhere.  I hate dealing with traffic, or crowds.

I managed to get some pictures, although kinda bad due to blur caused by my setup. (welding glass on telephoto lens)

I need to invest in a better setup for this kind of thing.  Would be cool to get venus transit and stuff at some point.

[RGB255_0_0]

If you have the opportunity to see a once-in-400-year event why not? These events get kids interested in something sciencey for 1 day.

Also allows for stupid people to look directly at the sun and damage their eyes.

[Red Squirrel]

If you have the opportunity to see a once-in-400-year event why not? These events get kids interested in something sciencey for 1 day.

Also allows for stupid people to look directly at the sun and damage their eyes.

I know of a guy in Washington DC who did that. 

[MarkS]

A flat earther treatise from the Houston Chron

We theorize the sun and moon are closer than we have been told and are the same size. They may work as a cathode and diode, or, better said, a positive and negative relationship.

That's cleared that up then, difficult to argue with that.

I can understand the lack of electrical knowledge and can hardly blame them for that, however, how can two objects of equal size move into alignment in such a fashion as to totally block one from the other -- equally? They are either infinitely flat disks, spaced at an infinitely close distance to each other, or they somehow manage to "phase through" each other. 

[Jwalling]

Just for the heck of it, I took a couple of photos with my cell phone at about 64% totality in the New England area. I think the smaller (sub?) disk away from the sun and above is showing the occlusion!
Don't know why this happened!

[bd139]

Space aliens

[schmitt trigger]

A flat earther treatise from the Houston Chron

We theorize the sun and moon are closer than we have been told and are the same size. They may work as a cathode and diode, or, better said, a positive and negative relationship.

That's cleared that up then, difficult to argue with that.

Googling and Youtubing eclipse photos last evening, I was surprised at the enormous amount of flat-earth believers there are.
How can anyone, in the XXI-century, still believe that?

What sort of aberrant education did they receive?

[Richard Crowley]

What sort of aberrant education did they receive?

You don't really want to open THAT can of worms, do you?   

The earth only looks "round" because of the fish-eye lens they use to take photos of it! 

[tggzzz]

Googling and Youtubing eclipse photos last evening, I was surprised at the enormous amount of flat-earth believers there are.
How can anyone, in the XXI-century, still believe that?

What sort of aberrant education did they receive?

There is a continuum between perceptive rational thinking, average thinking, and madness; nothing is black and white.

To me the surprise is that the human brain (usually) works as well as it does, and that we can achieve any commonality of understanding

[jonovid]

list of important up and coming north american events in 2017. 
large near-Earth asteroid, just in case you forget the eclipse.
North Korea may be sending nuclear packages by rocket,on the 11 of september.
china shipping maybe ramming more north american naval ships.
G, Soros will be planning more civil unrest, so the News media has something to feed on.
trying to get a new american civil war started. 
have I missed anything? 

[schmitt trigger]

An European acquaintance just emailed me a brand new one:
During her youth living in the GDR, Angela Merkel was sent to an -undisclosed- Arab state, where she secretly became a Muslim.

[Zero999]

The UK had something similar in 1999. The Totality only occurred down in the extreme South West and in the days beforehand several million descended on Cornwall for an eclipse in the morning and then all tried to leave at the same time. Cornwall's two major routes in+out (A30 + A38) converge at the M5 Motorway. Each of those routes had traffic jams over 40 miles long and the minor roads were just as bad. 

For extra comedy value the weather was heavily overcast with broken clouds and while some got a good view many million saw nothing   

Personally, I slept through the eclipse after going to out the night before and forgetting to set my alarm 

Guest houses and hotels also raised their prices, so many Brits went to Europe, where accommodation was cheaper.

[T3sl4co1l]

Went down to visit friends and watched it in BFE, deep in the back woods of Kentucky.

Very cool.

Sky was nearly perfect, only a few wisps of cirrus clouds.  Afternoon cumulus clouds were on the horizon but they left us alone!

Saw three jets and a plane that were roughly on the same course.  Some people got an "up close" view, it seems!

Tim

[CatalinaWOW]

It will be interesting to see how much eye damage occurred from this eclipse.  Here in Southern Oregon there was heavy smoke from forest fires.  The scattering was sufficient that pinhole cameras did not work, but it was clearly not safe to watch bare eyed.   I wonder if the people who planned to watch using pinhole and other similar projectors had the discipline to not look directly.

It was worth breaking off for a few minutes to watch the 95% coverage.  Dark and cooler, caused the wild turkeys to start heading back to their roosting area.  Because of the smoke density required was only about 12.  Still wasn't worth driving for.

[LabSpokane]

Saw three jets and a plane that were roughly on the same course.  Some people got an "up close" view, it seems!

Tim

Two of those jets may have been the WB-57s that NASA was flying to take images of the corona.  By chasing the eclipse they are able to film totality for 3X as long as a ground-based camera. 

[basinstreetdesign]

Here in Ontario, near London we got 75-80% totality.  I just grabbed my 33 year old 3" Newtonian reflector telescope (cheapo mount and barrel but good optics) that had been doing nothing for QUITE a while and stuck that on the deck, pointed it at the sun and projected the image on the side of the house.  The image was about 18" diameter and showed the disk, sunspots and all just fine.  No corona, though - that was a shame.  It was traveling across the wall at about 2"/minute.  It was touch-and-go for a while whether we would get a break through the clouds but they cleared up just fine about 1/2 hr before the show started.

[TimFox]

Now that we are both retired, road trips are much more practical.
We drove from Chicago to Columbia, MO (home of the University of Missouri) and stayed in a hotel across the street from a very nice city park (Cosmo Park) that had very good greenswards and nice people.  Light overcast before totality, but the disc was clearly visible through eclipse glasses.  It seemed to break just in time for totality, which gave a wonderful show (too bad the totality interval on this one was relatively short).  Ten minutes or so after totality ended, a typical midwestern dark cloud totally covered the sun (one could not find it even with the naked eye), but there were breaks during the post-totality that allowed visibility through eclipse glasses.

[T3sl4co1l]

Wow, you got lucky -- I heard MO got pretty much screwed!

Tim

[TimFox]

Kansas City, MO (well west of Columbia) actually had flooding.