The Total Solar Eclipse Was Like Nothing You’ll See on Earth. Here’s How

Stephen Ngo
Aug 25, 2017 · 2 min read

It started with the temperature.

All day, we had baked under suffocating radiance of the South Carolina summer — a singeing orange glare, as if we were day-old fries beneath the incandescent light bulb of a heat lamp.

Through naked eyes, the light was still too bright to even hazard a direct peek. But through the blackened view of eclipse glasses, half the orange sun had been eaten by a shadow, leaving a Pac-Man-shaped impression.

The heat changed. The daylight took on the artificial white glow of pale basement fluorescent lights. And as the duller brightness lingered, the air seemed to lose 20 degrees Fahrenheit in 20 minutes.

The bright blue 2pm sky faded to twilight. Venus, only a few degrees away in the sky, blinked into being — a shining white dot. The whole horizon shone with rays, as if the sun was setting in all places at once.

But the sunset was above. Through the glasses, only a sliver of a semicircle remained. From the bottom, it burnt away clockwise like a lit fuse. The bottom tip of the sliver smoothly inched clockwise from 7 o’clock to 12 o’clock, as though the sun was counting down to its own final midnight.

A cheer rose from the gathered crowd, and the plastic filters were at last lowered. Photography of the sight shows a dark circle bathed in a barely-stifled solar glare; human eyes — forged by eons of natural selection — showed much, much more.

There was a black orb, dark as night. It didn’t glow with any earthly light, but instead oozed streams of molten, gleaming gas, so thick they almost wafted like white flames. Wisps of flickering white energy drifted further away, like electrified layers of string slowly being pulled from a ball of yarn.

The star, stripped of its power to blind and burn, was revealed: an erupting explosion squeezed into place by gravity, spewing its vaporizing-hot fire in violent bursts into the vastness of space.

The revelation lasted 130 seconds. A radiant flash appeared on the edge of the dark orb, as though a flashlight was peeking around from behind.

The eclipse glasses went on. The sun resumed its ferocious shine. And the peephole to creation clicked shut.

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Stephen Ngo

Written by

Operations Analyst @ BevSpot | The Data Guy | Travel Enthusiast

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