Main Engine Cut Off - T+58: Totality

Episode Date: August 25, 2017

I spent 2 minutes and 40 seconds in the shadow of the Moon in Gallatin, TN. Totality was an incredibly powerful experience, and I wanted to share what it was like to be there as best I could. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 17 executive producers—Kris, Mike, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Jamison, Guinevere, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, and four anonymous—and 66 other supporters on Patreon. Exploring Nashville My exact location in Gallatin, TN for totality My 8" Dobsonian telescope setup My photo of totality on Flickr Path of April 8, 2024 total solar eclipse in North America Email your thoughts and comments to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhere Subscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off Newsletter Buy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off Shop Support Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon

Welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo here with a different sort of episode than is typical. I'm typically talking about launch vehicles and politics and strategy and all of this really hard stuff that we enjoy discussing. But I took a road trip down to Nashville last weekend with my dad and my brother, and we ended up in Gallatin, Tennessee for the total solar eclipse. So I wanted to talk about my experience in totality because it is a truly life-changing experience. And that sounds silly to anyone who has not experienced it yet. But for those of you out there that were in the path of totality, I know it was a special experience for anyone in that line and something that is impossible to describe. But I wanted to talk a little bit about it because of how amazing of an experience it was. So as I said, we took a road

trip down to Nashville. We got down Saturday night. We had a day to kind of hang out in Nashville Sunday. It was just me, my dad and my brother. And I actually got to meet up with a listener out there. Trevor was down from Montreal, so we hung out on Sunday night before the eclipse. And it was a great time, having a good time in Nashville. But then Monday morning, we hopped in the car and we drove up to Gallatin, Tennessee, which is about 30 minutes north of Nashville, northeast, just on the north side of the Cumberland River. And Gallatin is directly on the center line of totality. Nashville itself was in the path of totality, but I wanted to get as close to that center line as possible. So I did some scoping out on Apple and Google Maps and all the things and

tried to find some good spots. And there was a nice looking park in Gallatin that I thought would be a good spot to hang out. And there was actually an event going on just a little bit north of that park in Gallatin that was the official event of the town. And they had, I think, something like 40,000 people at that event from what I heard people talking about. But the park we were in was actually pretty quiet. There was a bunch of people there, but it was a very big park for the amount of people that were there.

The parking lot, it wasn't even filled itself, which I was a little bit shocked at. But, you know, it was filled with families and kids running around and science teachers and people with cameras and telescopes. And I had my eight-inch Dobsonian telescope set up with the solar filter and all. So we were able to hang out and enjoy, you know, meeting people and sharing each other's telescopes and looking at what everyone had set up. There was a couple of beautiful sunspots on the sun. If you had a chance to look through some of the photos or if you had a chance to look at the sun through a telescope itself, you could see these beautiful sunspots, one kind

of turning the corner on the surface and a couple others sprawled out right across the middle. So that was pretty cool to be able to see all that all day and have that to look at as the moon moved across the sun and all that. So it was a great experience. The environment there was very calm and relaxing. And while it was incredibly hot, as a Tennessee summer typically is, there was a nice breeze. It was a beautiful day down in Tennessee and just about the perfect environment for an eclipse like this. Now, if you got to see the partial eclipse from anywhere else in the country, if you had less than, say, maybe 90%,

you probably didn't notice too much of a difference in the world around you. You know, it was a very cool sight to look at as the moon moved across the sun, but it didn't change a lot of the environment around you. And when you get up above the 90s, and especially during totality, the world completely changes around you. And there's a lot of incredible things that happen, really just starting about 15 minutes before totality. It's a very short amount of time for such drastic changes, but that's really when you start to notice these things. You know, all day it was very hot, as I said, and once it got to 50% coverage, you started to feel it cool down a little bit, which was much needed as we were all sweating to death out in this park. But, you know, you start to feel that heat change, maybe above 50% or so, but there's really not any

stark changes like there are in that last 15 minutes before totality. So I want to take you from that 15 minute mark through totality, since that was really the bulk of the experience for us. But before I do that, I do want to say thank you to all of you out there supporting Manage and Cutoff on Patreon. There are 83 of you supporting the show week in and week out, and I am so thankful for your support. This particular episode was produced by 17 executive producers. Chris, Mike, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Jameson, Guinevere, Nadeem, Peter, Donald, Lee, and four anonymous executive producers. They made this episode possible, and I could not do it without their support,

and everyone else over at patreon.com slash Miko. If you want to help support the show, head over there and do that. So as I said, we'll start about 15 minutes before totality when things start to change, and you start noticing first a little bit of a cool breeze blowing in, and the coolness that you've been experiencing for the last maybe half hour or so really picks up again with this cool breeze. And then the light quality starts to change. It's not a soft light, like a sunrise or a sunset, but it's still an intense light, but dim, if that makes any sense. The colors are still very saturated, they're not all that golden hue like you get at sunrise or sunset. And the shadows themselves are very, very sharp and very stark. And that's because,

you know, when the sun is in full, you have a bit of parallax between the edges of the sun and any object that's casting a shadow, in the same way that a solar eclipse works. You get the umbra and the penumbra and all that kind of stuff. When the sun is just a tiny sliver, the shadows, you know, that your body is creating on the ground and that trees are creating are extraordinarily sharp.

And it's a very weird kind of experience to see the world in that. You have this dim light, but these incredibly sharp shadows. And that's just something that you don't often see. You don't, in nature or even in artificial environments, see lights that are casting stark shadows that is that dim. So that's a pretty eerie experience. And then about five minutes before totality, the environment around you is taking on this pinkish-golden-orangey hue to it, and everything is still that very saturated amount,

but in these very brilliant colors, and it was a really incredible sight. And maybe about ten minutes before totality, all of the birds in the entire park stopped chirping. And all of the bugs, the cicadas, the crickets, everything, grew to a deafening level. They were waking up as if it was evening, and it was, you know, 1.30 in the afternoon for us down there. So that was a really cool moment

when you hear that sound switch from day to night and, you know and day to evening. And that bug noise is just kind of deafening throughout as they are waking up thinking that it's nighttime, it's time to get out of our nests here and head out for the night. And then in the final few minutes, you've got your glasses on, you're looking through a telescope, you see this tiny, tiny, tiny little crescent sun and the last bits of light you start seeing filtering through the geography on the moon as it kind of makes contact with the other side of the sun. You see some orphans of light coming through the mountaintops and things like that.

And you've got your eclipse glasses on for that last moment, that last bit of light, and you see it go out. And you've got your eclipse glasses on and you're in a dark environment. So when that last bit of sunlight goes out, it is entirely black in your field of view. And for a moment, you're just kind of in a void and you rip your glasses off and you are just totally overwhelmed with the sight that you see when you rip those glasses off and you see a world that is completely transformed into something that you've never seen before. And I think we kind of overuse the terms breathtaking and awesome and things like that. But when you really think about those true definitions, it's full of awe and it takes your breath away. That first moment when everyone takes off their glasses or looks up from

a telescope and sees the total eclipse is something that if you've been in that moment, you'll remember that forever because it is incredibly shocking and powerful and completely overwhelming. And there is no possible way for you to prepare for seeing that sight for the first time. And I imagine the second time and the third time, I imagine it's just as powerful to see every time. But it is a really intensely emotional moment. And I've heard that from my friends that are giant space geeks that have been thinking about this for their entire lives like I am. And I've heard that from people I work with. One of the ladies I work with

lives in, she has family in Nashville. So she was there for the eclipse. And she's not necessarily a giant space geek like us. But she said to me, you know, that was, I was totally unprepared for how emotional I was going to get during it. And that's a thing that, you know, it's cool to have everyone have that shared experience, whether they're professional astronomers that have been studying the sun's corona for so long, or people that are just, you know, interested in space and science, or people that have just found themselves in the path that experienced it for the first time. Everyone has that same overpoweringly emotional moment when you see for the first time this corona stretching across the sky and the moon, you know, the moon over the sun is the blackest black you have ever seen in your life. They say that true black does not appear in nature,

but I think if they've seen a total eclipse, they might amend their statement. That is the blackest black that you can ever see with your human eyes without any alterations around them. I've seen one photo that captures a little bit of what it looked like during totality. It's hard to capture because of the dynamic ranges of colors and vibrancy of lights. You know, you've got this black, black moon. You've got this brilliant shining corona stretching across the sky. And the sky itself is this deep blue, purpley kind of hue to it. It's not black like you see in the photos of a corona, right? That's due to the exposure settings you need to capture the corona. It is this deep blue purpley kind of thing with a

very black hole in the middle and this shimmering corona stretching across it and it is just extraordinary. I can't explain to you what that looks like. It is a sight that is totally unfamiliar yet incredibly beautiful, incredibly powerful and something you will never forget what it looks like. And in the photos, you know, you see a landscape photo of the eclipse, it looks pretty tiny up in the sky, and it looks like something that is very distant. But when you are there, when you're in totality, it has this commanding presence over the landscape. And whether or not, you know, it is actually physically big,

when you are in that moment, it feels like it covers the entire sky, and the corona stretches on forever. And that is just something that, you know, you can't get the same perspective in photos or videos or things like that. When you're there and it draws all of your attention, it just commands its presence over the entire landscape. And it's absolutely incredible. Once you're over that initial moment of just overpowering joy and emotion and there's a lot of yelling and once that subsides and you get a chance to step back and really take the entire scene in, depending on how long you were in totality for, this would

maybe change a little bit depending on how rushed or how much time you had. In Gallatin, we had two minutes and 40 seconds of totality, which I think was only about half a second off the maximum duration possible. So we were right on the center line at maximum eclipse, and we had about 2 minutes and 40 seconds to take in the sights of totality. And the first thing that you'll notice is Jupiter and Mars and Mercury and Venus stretched out across the ecliptic, and you get this sense of the solar system as an object. That for me, other than that first moment when I looked at the corona for the first time, I think that vision of seeing the entire solar system sprawled out across the sky was

something that is the most powerful thing to remember. We hear a lot about the overview effect, when somebody goes to space and they look back at Earth and it changes their perspective on what Earth is. They see it as this object, this whole object that's fragile and beautiful, and they don't see it as a map sees it or as a map draws it. They see it as it really is in space. And that changes their perspective when they come back and they experience Earth again. They have a different look on it. And I think being in totality is the same thing, but on a solar system level. You know, you look up and you see planetary motion with the moon moving across the sun, and you see the sun as it really is with this dynamic object

with corona and prominences. And it's not just this bright point of light in the sky, it's a physical object that you can really get a sense for how big it is and what it does and what it's like. And then you see planets, you know, Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, and Venus were there for us, sprawled across the ecliptic. And you can see them as this entire display of planetary motion. And it feels like for two minutes and 40 seconds that I was not on the Earth's surface looking up at the solar system, but I was actually pushed out among it. And I could stand there and see the system as a whole and really get a sense for where we're at in it and how big this thing is. And I say how big it is, but for me, it was

how small it is. I think some people have experiences in totality when they feel how tiny we are as humans in the face of something so immense like that. But I had the other experience where I was able to look at the solar system itself and see that it's our tiny little neighborhood where we live. It's our little corner of the universe that we get to experience. And, you know, you can still see the immense distances between things, between the moon and the sun and how far away Jupiter is and all of that. But you really get a sense for being a part of that

solar system, not just as disparate objects that you might look at in telescopes from time to time, or see photos of when we send probes there. You really get to look at it as a system, not just a collection of objects that happen to orbit each other somewhere out in the galaxy. And that moment, I think, is something that I'll always remember is seeing that as a whole thing. It felt very much like the great family photos that we have taken of the solar system through Voyager probes and Pioneer probes as we've traveled through the universe and looked back at the solar system. It felt like that, but you get to see it with your own eyes. And that is just absolutely incredible. And then for the last few minutes, I just, remember I looked at my watch,

I had about a minute left, and that was the best feeling, is that I get another whole minute of this, and I think I just sat down in the grass and laid down and looked up at the corona and really tried to take all of that in, because it is this intensely bright thing, but so finely textured. You know, you have a lot of textures going on through the different prominences and the corona expanding itself all the way across the sky is just an absolutely incredible view to behold and something that I'd really just wanted to lay there and take in for the last few moments. And that is something that I will never forget. It's just, I keep saying that, but it is such an experience that is impossible to put into words, impossible to capture in a photo, impossible to capture in a video. But when you're there, it is such an entire world experience that

it's hard to capture that feeling. And you really have to be in totality to know what it's like. And I think anyone out there that was in this path of totality or has been in other paths will really understand that, that it is an entirely different experience and it is impossible to ever explain to anybody what it feels like to be in there. But when you see those nature changes, like I was talking about at the beginning, and then you see the corona and you see the solar system spread out, you see the sky colors, you have those weird shadows going on, everything just comes together in such a beautiful and powerful way that is an entire experience that is just unbelievable to the extreme and something that everyone, I think, needs to experience

once in their life, at least. But I think once you experience it once, you will be set on experiencing it again and again. So I could go on about this forever, but I think I would probably start repeating myself if I have not already. But needless to say, it was maybe the best moment in my entire life when I took off those glasses and saw the total solar eclipse for the first time. It was something that I will never forget. And I hope that if you were in the path that you had that similar experience, I hope if you were in anywhere in the partial region, you still got to see a very cool astronomical event, but that you will seriously make some plans for the next one, whether it's

the next one in South America or one anytime between now and 2024 when there's another total solar eclipse that goes across North America. That will be another cool one. And I hope that the proximity of these two dates will spur some people that have not yet seen one to make some plans for seven years from now where to be. The path is going to go across Mexico, across Texas, and then hook up towards the Great Lakes and out towards Montreal and Maine. So very good path for a lot of people that live in North America in these highly populated regions.

So it's going to be in April 2024. So given that the weather in the Northeast is not always the best in April, I think I will probably make some plans to head down towards the Texas area, where there's better chances for some good weather at that point. But that's quite a bit of ways off, so we will make some plans over the next couple years. But I hope that you had as amazing of an experience as I did in totality if you were there. And I know that we will never forget that few minutes of time that we got to spend in the shadow of the moon. So thank you very much for listening, and I will talk to

you next week.