Black Hole in the Sky
Chasing the Eclipse of 2024
It looked, like a hole. There was no other word for it. A hole that swallowed up all the daylight that had been there only moments ago.
It had been easy, so to speak, to decide a space to watch the phenomenon from; parking lots in Western NY were never very full. It was also fortunate that for such a rare astronomical event the line of totality in 2024 was going to pass right through Buffalo, a city I had continued to live in after completing my studies.
What had not been easy was seeing on the weather app — after months of waiting and weeks of weather tracking — that there were going to be clouds. On April the 8th, the day of the solar eclipse.
It’s a fine day today, I thought on the 4th, as I tested the solar filter sheet and glasses that had arrived in the mail. And again on the 7th on my walk to Lowe’s to look for a screw that’d help attach a new tripod to my old point-and-shoot zoom camera. The cloud cover still showed an increasing percentage as I stayed up the night making a frame for the filter to stay on the lens for my first experience.
At sunrise, there were wisps of cloud but nothing obstructive, and there were patches of clear sky.
I had taken the day off and went to pick up a rental car at 8 am to have mobility when hunting for viewing spots. The wisps had not increased much but the sun had gotten hazier. Quite a lot hazier. As I drove something about “low and high clouds” in a forecast came back to me. When I reached my chosen spot in the university parking lot with most of the horizon visible, it had become hard to pick out the low or the high clouds. Or even the sun.
In the 1 pm to 3:30 pm slot on the weather app, the cloud cover was going to reduce from 100% to 70–80%. The live news folks kept on being hopeful at Niagara Falls, where people had flocked from all over the country to witness the spectacle. Well, even if it was overcast the sky would get all dark at totality, cloudy or not. It’d be hard to miss it, right?
It was 11 am, and I opened the cloud tracker website that had shown clouds for miles around over the next 4 hours. Near the 2 pm mark now, the clouds southwest were opening up, barely reaching Erie, nearly a 2-hour drive away.
I hesitated. Oh well, all or nothing. I took to the road and hit the I-90 to catch up with Erie before the moon caught up with the sun.
There were signs all along the road declaring the time of the event and instructing drivers to not be surprised or stop mid-road. But the clouds didn’t change much; every hill I rode over was a chance to peek at the distant horizon, and they went on all the way. It was hard to believe there was any gap coming up.
I kept thinking if Erie turned out to have worse weather, not getting to see the eclipse would more directly be my fault rather than the weather’s if I had stood my ground in Buffalo. But the road ran southwest and the clouds in the app had seemed to be coming directly up it. And so it made sense to give in to the illusion of distance.
After driving for what seemed like hours, against all hope, a blue patch started growing in the south. The clouds thinned, and soon, about 2 miles from Erie, nearly a third of the sky had cleared.
It was 1:20 pm and all sunny. But as I drove around to find an empty parking lot I knew, of course, that the moon had already caught up. The Sun is just too bright to let a partial block bother its luminosity much. I got off, put on my solar glasses, and there it was: a cut on the bottom edge, like an apple bite.
I quickly spread my poncho on the concrete, angled the camera, and furiously started taking pictures.
It was a few minutes after this when my consciousness, and disbelief, kicked in. For hours I had been reevaluating how I would go about it and now I had the chance to see something I had marveled at for so long. Hadn’t I planned to watch the documentary clip that had nearly 20 years ago for the very first time shown me the wonder, to tell myself it was finally happening for real? It was still 40 minutes to totality but after all that time, it seemed just around the corner.
The sunspots were all covered now and there was still barely a noticeable drop in sunlight, not more than what a cloud might cover. The prehistoric man would have had no idea what was going to hit him.
The light was growing faintly dimmer.
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It was only a sliver now. But it barely had time to be.
It winked out. The sky went dark. There were gasps and screams.
And for the first time, I was able to look unblinking directly towards the sun.
It became a hole. A hole that sucked all light. Or maybe emanated it faintly, the ball that gave light during the day had a very big ring around it now. The night that grew from it ended far, far away at the edge of vision into a continuous amber sunset-y horizon. All around.
Of course, I knew what was happening because I had read about it. But I couldn’t help devising explanations, like the people in bygone ages who might have seen it for the first time. It became hard to scoff at them. You saw a night sky with stars which by all rights should be day. You saw a golden horizon in any direction you looked. You saw a fiery ring in the sky where the power source of all life should be.
Trembling, hollering, and staring, it was all I could do to take it all in.
I glanced at the zoom camera, and came slightly back to reality, something along that big ring caught my eye. Some readjustment brought it into focus.
There is always a lot going on in the corona, the atmosphere of the Sun, as is seen in so many NASA images. It is something that stretches way, way beyond its surface, and is very, very active.
It looked very alive now, but at the bottom, I could see, at first glance some reddish spots. It took me a few seconds to realize I was seeing something I never thought I’d be able to capture myself, in real-time: prominences, vast bursts of energy stretching out for thousands of miles, much larger than the Earth.
Well, what a lucky catch.
And with that, at the same time as the imaginary explanations, you could see things for real and so rise up and beyond the heavens, into space, and take in the motion of the planets around the Sun. Feeling lucky to have a moon with just the right size and distance compared to it, and be able to witness an occurrence unlike anywhere else in the Solar system, and have the means to see it with your own eyes.
The darkness went on. The ring shone. With so many coincidences, it seemed like anything in the world could happen.
After a short or possibly a very long time, the moon shifted, forming a diamond ring for just a few seconds before the day was back as quickly as it had gone.
The moon still hung around another hour or so. It wouldn’t do to leave right away, and I made sure to capture it going on its way.
And that was it. The clockwork of the heavens grabbing me by the throat indeed. An experience I won’t be able to shake off.
As I started to pack up, the clouds came in again. A fitting curtain call, if ever there was one.
