The 2024 Eclipse Experience
One of the rarest, most surreal yet prettiest phenomena that exists: a total solar eclipse. But what if there are clouds?
Some things are just out of your control, and sometimes things just don’t go right. Events that fall under both categories can be some of the most frustrating experiences in life. If you’re a sports fan, you know this particularly well.
Weather always falls under the first category and, as the nursery rhyme “Rain, rain, go away/Come again another day” implies, sometimes the second one. But there is only one scenario where five minutes of cloud cover without precipitation can precipitate panic. It’s the difference between things getting momentarily colder and darker, and an incredibly rare and beautiful sight that few people ever see except in photographs.
As the total solar eclipse of April 8, 2024 approached, millions of Americans held their collective breath as the cloud cover predictions—a notoriously ridiculous undertaking essentially only done before eclipses—deteriorated.
Preparations
With a week to go, our group of five—my parents, my brother and his wife, and I—was going to see the eclipse in one of two places. We had narrowed our destination down to near the Indiana/Ohio border, where we had booked hotels, and Clayton, New York, a town of about 1,700 people on the southern bank of the St. Lawrence River just east of Lake Ontario. My aunt and uncle live there.
At this point, the meteorologists began trying to make cloud cover predictions. And they looked significantly better in New York. Plus, accommodations in Clayton were free and we would get to visit family. Hotel cancellation deadlines were approaching and the call was made on Wednesday, April 3 to go to Clayton. It’s about a 7.5-hour drive.
The map looked like this:
The very next day, things began to turn for the New York forecast. And they only got worse and worse. By the time we left on April 6, clouds were staring not only us in the face, but most of the geographic area of the path of totality.
The Day Before
My folks arrived around 9pm Saturday night and my brother, sister-in-law, and me around 11. On the way up we visited my other brother off I-81 in Pennsylvania.
By Sunday, April 7, things were simultaneously looking great and terrible. Unfortunately, the great part was meaningless in terms of the objective of the trip: that entire day, there was not a single cloud visible in the sky at any point. It made for a great day of visiting, walking, dining, and it would have been an amazing eclipse day.
If only. The terrible part, of course, was that the forecast was no different than it had been the day before.
Contingency ideas abounded. Would we dare try northeast Vermont, a 4.5 hour drive on a good day? Not everyone was willing to go on that trip anyway—at some point at least one person stated they’d go wherever I did, but it wasn’t clear who else would be on board.
Maine was even an even crazier distance to consider, even though the national narrative was now that the state was one of the few places in totality that would get a clear shot.
What about elsewhere in New York, small pockets an hour or two away (again, without eclipse traffic) that might call for 20-40% cloud cover instead of 40-60 percent? Really small pockets—I’d never been to Russell, New York—but they were on the table too.
Someone on Reddit suggested local National Weather Service branches as an information source. The one in Buffalo offered some hope that “north central New York” would have largely “high cloud” cover, which is more transparent than middle or lower clouds.
The Day Of
I woke up around seven in the morning to find that high cloud cover had already moved in. The final maps of the day had also come in, and it wasn’t any better. In fact, the difference was now between 60-80% of sky coverage and 40-60%.
I went downstairs, where my parents and aunt were already awake. (My uncle was helping take care of their grandson a few miles south in Watertown, also within totality.)
I’d given up. Instead of driving around like headless chickens, desperately seeking some clear pocket of sky that might never appear, it was time to make the most of the company. And who knows, maybe we’d get lucky, 70% cloud cover be damned. This idea of higher, thinner clouds helped in taking that chance, so who knows, if I hadn’t been pointed to those reports, maybe the aforementioned chicken impression would have happened.
Everyone else was fine with the plan, and with the idea of travel out the picture, things became simultaneously more and less relaxed. More relaxed because we could just hang out and wait. Less, because… well, I don’t need to explain. Clouds don’t just disappear, right?
We did some minimal scouting, hoping to at least see the “360-degree sunset”—totality is such a narrow band that you can see non-totality on the entire surrounding horizon.
The partial phase of the eclipse began around 2:10, with totality due at 3:22. Observation was patchy. Not zero, yet there was plenty of time during the partial phase where the clouds completely blocked observation.
Around 2:30, we moved to our observation spot in the backyard. Well, back pier:
About 45 minutes before totality we noticed a bluish patch of sky coming toward-ish us. Could it happen? The sun continued to come into and out of view. A different pocket came and went.
Most of us were seated in chairs, while I spent time alternating between heavy pacing on the shore and sitting down directly on the pier, looking through those special eclipse glasses. I have a slight benign tremor as it is, and with nerves on top of that, the last thing I was going to do was lose my balance and plunge into the cold water. So I didn’t even trust a lawn chair.
One consequence of the pacing was that I noticed a particular handrail casting a particular shadow, and I began using this to judge how visible totality might be. Even during high partial coverage, the shadows during an eclipse are rather surreal. That’s no surprise—the sun is high in the sky, yet only twilight is reaching your location on Earth.
The shadows didn’t go away—good sign. Then 80% partiality became 90% became 95 became 99, 99.1, 99.2…
A couple minutes before totality, I found the setting to add seconds to my phone’s clock, but at 3:21:30, I put it away.
One of my strongest memories from the eclipse is watching that last fraction of a percentage from behind the glasses. At that point you can see the gap closing, but it’s still taking a couple seconds—a couple seconds that seem like forever.
I couldn’t help hold my breath (or was I breathing faster?) and gasp, and then…
Totality
I’d done some cursory research into how to photograph an eclipse—the proper ISOs, exposures, and all that—but I forgot completely to refresh my memory in the days beforehand, so stressful was the leadup to the day. I even left my dedicated camera (14 years old as it is) in my aunt and uncle’s house. Cell phone it was, which in some ways is actually more programmable anyway.
Not that it came to mind. In the moment, I thought maybe video would do the trick, but that captures too much light. I tried zooming in, but you still couldn’t see the moon.
The resulting video is 8 seconds long. I hesitate to show it because it will underplay the aura of the event, and you will find much better recordings elsewhere. But this is my recording. I can only say two good things about it: it captures the clouds—yes, that high cloud cover stayed high cloud cover, and we got our look!—and it captures Venus. The panicky bird flying by is kind of funny, and on the zoom-in you can squint and sort of see a couple prominences where the low-resolution disk of the sun isn’t quite circular.
Those precious 15 or so seconds gone (don’t forget the time to take the phone back out), it was time to watch.
Most normal eclipse observers spend their time on the corona, some on the “shadow bands” cast by the corona. But I’m now 0/2 in really, truly, strongly implanting the corona image in my mind. What I do remember is being slightly tricked by the prominences—was this really totality (of course it was) when parts of the sun still seemed so bright? You had this black ball in the center and this intense, uneven layer of light between it and the corona. At the 7 o’clock position was a particularly bright point, one of the prominences.
I can’t do the color of the sky justice. It’s just not any normal twilight quality, but a deep navy with a purplish tinge, perhaps the reddishness of the horizon mixing with the dark blue of the sky. Then I spent a few seconds looking behind me… bright orange starkly below a canopy of deep purple (not the band). It’s not often you see a “sunset” to the northeast. And usually when the sunset is intense, the sky isn’t that dark yet, and when the sky is that dark, the sunset is no longer intense. There’s only one way to get both.
Someone set off fireworks across the inlet, which subtracts from the experience for some people, but I found it added to the celebratory mood in a perfectly acceptable way.
And after a couple minutes, I finally noticed them: Jupiter on one side of the sun, Venus other. I’ve looked up at these planets countless times in my life, but never with an devoured sun in between them.1 It was only after the eclipse that I even noticed I’d captured Venus on the video.
Among the six of us, we had one pair of binoculars. It is this view where I best remember the corona. It’s such a wispy, delicate-looking thing, and it gives the impression of movement even though it’s not actually observably moving.
You don’t want to be checking the clock to see how much time is left. Conscious that one person had still not gotten the binoculars, I probably spent 10-15 seconds with the pair and passed them on. In the rush I failed to take a couple seconds on that 7 o’clock solar prominence. Oh well.
And then it was the last few seconds. There isn’t a feeling of dread that the thing is about to end, it’s just a fact of the thing. They tell you the moment the sun reemerges you need to put the glasses back on, but that’s probably the least realistic piece of eclipse advice out there. You basically have to stop before the end of totality to truly comply, and who on Earth would stop early?
After
So yeah, we saw the eclipse. I was “congratulated” for making the decision to stay in Clayton. All that angst and worry in the leadup became just another part of the experience, and in the end, we found a perfect spot without having to walk more than a few paces.
Apparently most people across the country who wanted to see it, did. Earlier in the day, Austin, Texas, where a couple at my church were, got a good chunk with it, but not the full duration. Another churchgoer actually had gone all the way to northeast Vermont with his dad and got a clear shot. But not everyone was lucky: Rochester was completely overcast, Buffalo largely so.
One “secret” I hid last week was that the 2017 eclipse was slightly disappointing for one basic reason: The sun/moon disk in the sky was much smaller than I expected. Having seen countless photos, which are almost all framed in a narrow shot, I hadn’t adjusted for how it might look to my naked eye. It was nice to be in a buzzing crowd and see the 360-degree sunset, but the spectacle itself wasn’t quite what I’d expected. That’s one reason I didn’t write much about it in that article.
For me, this eclipse completely… eclipsed (sorry) the one in 2017. Not only for the reasons I shared above, but because (and my brother confirms this) the solar and lunar discs were relatively huge compared to then.
But in all, from about noon Saturday until 8pm Tuesday, the trip lasted about 80 hours, or 4,800 minutes—but the main event lasted all of 3 1/2 minutes, 0.07% of the trip. Now compare minutes to months or decades.
It’s such a fleeting time. I could make some corny analogy about life, but I won’t.
Some people talk about a sort of depression following eclipses. This seems natural. It’s such a high, and then you don’t get another one for over a year if you’re lucky, several years later maybe, and never again if you’re not lucky.
Alone Tuesday evening for the first time since Saturday morning, I just wanted to rewind the clock to Monday afternoon. On Wednesday evening, I spent an hour on the phone with my parents recounting the events. That helped.
Now What?
I’ll tell you now what.
If you’ve ever wanted to go to Iceland, plan to be there August 12, 2026. You can get about a minute of totality in Reykjavik, or just over 2 minutes in a town called Olafsvik. If you prefer milder climates—let alone fewer clouds—northern Spain and Mallorca will get a sunset eclipse.
The August 2, 2027 eclipse goes over Gibraltar for about 4.5 minutes and Luxor, Egypt for a whopping 6+. The Pyramid of Giza gets about 3 minutes.
And if you’ve ever wanted to visit Australia, the date is July 22, 2028. It’s the last time Sydney will be in the path of totality until the 29th century (no joke), and totality will last nearly 4 minutes.
Nome and Utqiagvik (Barrow), Alaska get 2.5 minutes each on March 30, 2033, while Montana and the Dakotas get a little bit in on August 23, 2044, but the next great American eclipse is due for August 12, 2045. Disneyworld, with nearly 6 minutes of totality, is going to be a madhouse, but you’d have plenty of quieter options in the path from Eureka, California to Colorado Springs to Little Rock, Arkansas to elsewhere in Florida.
But 2045 is a long time from now—I’d be 57 should I make it (one never knows)—and international travel is expensive. I can only hope April 8, 2024 was not the last time my family and I will get to enjoy a total solar eclipse together.
Well, I think I noticed them in 2017, but I’m not totally sure. (Get it? Not “totally” sure?)