The 2017 total solar eclipse over America was an event I won’t forget. In the months leading up to it, I worked on my most involved, farm-to-table graphic story to date: Utilizing 5,000 years of eclipse paths data to show every eclipse during a reader’s lifetime. It was a tedious but very fun task, and I wrote about my trials and errors over on Source.
We followed that up with a second graphic that looked specifically at the path of this year’s eclipse, utilizing scroll to traverse 3,000 miles in pixels. On the day of the eclipse, the graphic had a live-scroll option that would show the approximate location of the umbra on the path. This latter feature was also repackaged as a homepage module as a moving locator on the page. My teammates and I put together another behind-the-scenes look over on Source (major thanks to the Source people for putting all these up).
The final piece for our eclipse coverage was a retrospective on how America viewed the event, especially because it was the first total solar eclipse in the U.S. in the social media age.
I got to witness the eclipse with my own eyes, a teary-eyed experienced sandwiched between the most horrifying traffic jams on I-95. Days after, sitting at my desk, realizing my small and feeble place in the universe, this video from NPR let me relive the wonders of it all again.
