by Lucas David
Last week, I flew to Texas to see the total solar eclipse, only to find the sky obstructed by heavy clouds that blanketed most of Texas. The forecast showed the possibility of blue sky in a couple different directions, hours away from us, but we couldn’t know for sure which of them (if any) would have a clear view of the eclipse. So that morning, my family and I picked one at random, and got very lucky. Only two or three clouds thick enough to obscure the sun actually passed over it during the eclipse, and none of them during totality. As the moon covered more and more of the sun, the sky darkened as though there was a sunset on all horizons, and the dazed and confused crickets began to chirp.
Once the sun was completely obscured, we could take off our protective glasses and see the eclipse without any layers of separation. The sun was blotted from the sky, the dark cavity in its place haloed by the sun’s corona. The corona itself looked about two and a half times the diameter of the sun (864,575 miles) in length, which means that that halo was really about 2,161,439 miles of plasma flying from a ball of gas 333,000 times the size of the earth and into an endless void.
Having tasted a total eclipse once, I’ve concluded that I’ll have no choice but to go to Egypt in seven years to witness the next one, hopefully with a recording device capable of giving a detailed view of the eclipse this time.
The Lighthouse 