A MAGNIFICENT EVENT

TO WITNESS THIS ECLIPSE, my wife, Holley, and I stayed at the Santa Fe, New Mexico, home of Michael Zeiler (my co-author of two eclipse books), for four nights. About three years earlier, he had suggested we watch the event from their hot tub. But the more we talked about it, the more we wanted to view from either the northern or southern limit to maximize the display of Baily’s beads.

Zeiler picked several possible spots, but the day before the eclipse we did a site survey and chose the Vista Grande Overlook Observation Site, which was at the path’s northern limit, just a 40-minute drive from his house. It stands at 10,288 feet (3,136 meters) in the middle of an aspen forest that was in full fall color. About a dozen other eclipse chasers joined us, including meteorologist Jay Anderson and mapmaker Xavier Jubier.

The eclipse began under a cloudless sky, which remained so for the duration. As usual, I was first to scream, “First contact!” (It’s a thing with me.) Holley and I set up small refractors and provided visitors many views of the partial phases. But the central eclipse was ours alone. As mid-eclipse approached, the temperature dropped markedly. I wasn’t recording it, but it forced me and many others to don another layer of clothing.

The bottom line: We observed seven minutes of Baily’s beads, although to be fair, a few near the end may have been due to the black-drop phenomenon, in which a transiting object seems to bulge like a teardrop as it nears the limb of the Sun. It was an amazing display. The cusps were incredibly thin and delicate. I imagined a minute or more of beads, and was hopeful of two minutes, but seven? I’d rate the experience as equal to or better than half of the 14 total solar eclipses I’ve observed. I never thought it would be so dramatic.