Places Where I Lurk

♥ Actual video of the total eclipse over Nashville, by Ayrika Whitney (embedded by The Tenneassean)

I've watched this video five times already, because look! It really was purple at the bottom! I've been looking up "purple" with relation to the 2017 total solar eclipse and have only been able to guess that what I was seeing in the corona at the time were solar prominences (actually considered red, but okay), but I had some doubt that they were really visible with the naked eye. This video seems to confirm that they were.

(As with many amazing pieces of eclipse documentation, this doesn't capture one of my top three* enjoyments of the eclipse, which was seeing the corona against a beautifully blue (not black!) sky. But it's the closest thing I've watched to what I remember seeing, which I find enjoyable and fantastic.)

Video of the crowd on the lawn outside the Gaylord Opryland Resort before, during, and after totality, by voges5

This is a 5-minute long tripod video of the crowd at the hotel where we stayed, and it's interesting to me for several reasons:

1) I heard Nashville's Adventure Science Center was clouded out, which seemed impossible to me even though there are clearly nearby clouds in the pictures I took during totality at the zoo, and when I looked at this video I can see that there are even bigger clouds visible in the Opryland sky. So clearly seeing totality is a lucky, lucky thing, and 15 minutes in either direction (the zoo where we were is 15 minutes south of the Adventure Science Center, and the hotel we stayed at was 15 minutes north of it, both with perfect views) makes all the difference.

2) It's hard to remember exactly how quickly it got dark (less than a minute), and how dark it got (post-sunset twilight), so it's cool to see perfectly recorded documentation from a place we were.

3) No one dances around in this video. Really? The moon covered the sun and I got up and gleefully spun around in circles. Literally no one in this video gets out of their chairs. That surprises me.

4) Also, we considered staying at the hotel instead of trying to get to the zoo, since the traffic reports were so ominous, and it's kind of fun to see that we didn't miss anything. (Locals at the Opry show the night before literally told me to give up on the zoo, that there was no way I'd get there. Other locals disagreed, of course, but it was discouraging. Plus our hotel was hosting two viewing parties, with another one a short walk away at the Opry, so why were we trying to go to the zoo again? We were tired! But we were less tired the next morning, so we called a taxi and Hasan drove us to the zoo in 27 minutes. No traffic. Then he came and picked us up at the end of the day and repeated the feat in reverse.) Also, the zoo was amazing. So the moral of the story is, don't give up on your dreams!

Video of flamingoes at the Nashville Zoo as the sun goes dark, by ByJasonGonzales

Everyone loves this video, as they should. It shows the oncoming twilight and flamingoes being awesome, all at once. (Also there's lots of screaming in the background; apparently it wasn't limited to the larger viewing areas.)

AP news story about the eclipse: "Eclipse Puzzles: Galloping Giraffles and Flocking Flamingoes" on the NBC News site, which is important because I am in the first picture they show (of people watching the giraffes), credited to Seth Borenstein with the AP. How exciting!

(I literally read this article twice without noticing, and when I came back to watch the flamingo video again I suddenly realized that I was that person standing at the fence in the giraffe picture. Wearing my orange lululemon backpack (with black seawheeze water bottle) and my sister's baseball cap, holding Travel Dog under my left elbow. I am absolutely positive my ipod is in my right hand, and I can probably find the photo I have just taken in that picture. Thanks Seth!)

*The moving, glowing, partially purple corona against a blue sky (and the way the sunlight flashed on either side of the moon), how quickly it went from strange daylight to circular twilight, and the crescent effect of seeing little eclipsed suns everywhere, under every tree, on every surface. And not unique to a solar eclipse, but the phenomenon of putting on glasses and being able to stare directly at the sun was unexpectedly awesome. It's the sun! Right there! Wow!

I would add, too, that although all of these things were amazing, being around other people who were also amazed by them magnified my delight. It was so cool to be walking along shaded paths and have someone go, "look at the crescents!" and just have a group of people stop and stare at the ground. And to be walking out in the sunlight where someone had stopped to stare up, and just stop to stare up with them, because look - the sun! And the moon! Doing a thing!

Hearing everybody cheer when darkness came on was also pretty wild ♥