ECLIPSE 2024
Eclipse Watching in Toronto
Cloud cover made it a bust… but not totally
Best laid plans.
I was planning to go down to Toronto’s waterfront to watch the total solar eclipse over Lake Ontario. We were not supposed to see the eclipse in totality but it would be close.
For days before the event, weather forecasters had been calling for cloudy skies all day. The eclipse may have been happening but we wouldn’t see it.
I decided to scrap my plans and go to a friend’s place uptown and watch it on TV. We watched with jealousy as the moon paused in front of the sun, eclipse totality for a few minutes. We tracked it as it made its path northeast across the continent. We listened to the crowds cheering and news reporters waxing poetic about this celestial event, while we were simply armchair rubberneckers.
Just as the moon was beginning to pass in front of the sun in Toronto, the clouds began to part. We finally had a direct view of the start of the eclipse.
I grabbed my point-and-shoot camera and my cardboard eclipse glasses. I had to put the glasses over my camera lens and then try to find the sun and focus on the historic moment. It wasn’t easy because it was a point of light that was difficult to find and I couldn’t remove the…
