Despite being a space reporter, this total solar eclipse completely freaked me out
It's really difficult to explain what I just saw.
I'm a space reporter. I know the science: The moon moved in front of the sun from Earth's perspective, blotting out our nearest star's light and plunging us into an eerie twilight here in Lenoir City, Tennessee.
I get it. That's what happened. Still. The feeling of experiencing this event is something that I'm going to be parsing out for a long time to come.
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My family and I got here at around 8 a.m. ET, fearful of traffic and other snags that might hold us up from making it to our appointed spot in Lenoir City before totality would occur, at 2:33 p.m. ET.
Our conversations for the past two days have been obsessive discussions about the weather, food choices, the number of people heading to the lake house where we're going to watch, and traffic.
Also, more talk about traffic.
Image: miriam kramer/mashable
We hung around for hours, socializing, eating, and blogging (well, I was reporting for Mashable while everyone else was drinking and eating, but that's neither here nor there). Then at around 1 p.m., the real excitement began.
People started running outside, eclipse glasses in hand, to watch as the moon encroached on the sun. Through the glasses, it looked like a bite was being taken out of the orange star, and then the bite got bigger and bigger, over the course of an hour and a half.
Once we hit about 30 minutes from totality, things started getting weird.
Image: Miriam kramer/mashable
The shadows of the trees took on a different look, and it was noticeably cooler that the typical 90-degree Fahrenheit heat of a Tennessee summer.
And the light was fading. Fast.
Crickets began chirping and cicadas woke up early. It sounded and looked like evening was falling.
Looking through the glasses, it was clear the sun was disappearing, our moon slowly but inexorably closing in over its face, blocking its light. Shadow bands appeared, waves of light that look like heatwaves swirling as twilight and totality descends.
Just before totality, Venus appeared as a bright dot not far above the horizon.
It was around that time that I started feeling nervous.
My nerves were beyond my control, or understanding. The sun was disappearing, and knowing all the science behind the event didn't help me. The total solar eclipse was freaking me out.
And then suddenly, just like that, the sun was gone.
Shouts of "glasses off" started to spread around the grassy lakeside area where we were positioned.
Just as suddenly as the sun disappeared, the moon was there, clear as day, surrounded in the hazy glow of the sun's outer atmosphere, only visible to us, thanks to our only natural satellite's uncanny ability to blot out the star in our sky.
We were in totality.
Venus started to shine more brightly, Jupiter appeared, and Mercury could be seen just next to the moon.
We all take the sun for granted. It shines with its heady brightness every day, disappears every night before making its reappearance the next morning.
But there was nothing that prepared me for what it would be like to experience the disappearance of the sun in the middle of the day.
It takes an event like this to drive home the point that we're all just tiny specks on the face of a rock flying through space. Yet sometimes, if we're lucky, that smallness allows us to experience something truly amazing.
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