Reporter experiences totality: ‘It felt like dawn and dusk and evening all at once.’
EDITOR’S NOTE: Houston Chronicle arts writer Wei-Huan Chen experienced Monday’s solar eclipse in his hometown of Clemson, S.C. He filed a report of the experience.
CLEMSON, S.C. — The transformation of the landscape was immediate.
One second before the totality, the Earth was still cast in daylight, though also strangely dim, as if we were losing our eyesight. Then, almost without warning, we were all plunged into an eerie blue twilight.
The total solar eclipse over Clemson began at 2:37 p.m. EST and lasted, coincidentally, 2 minutes and 37 seconds. The sky turned from light blue to darkish purple. The clouds grew more orange the closer they were to the horizon, which glowed a deep red in all directions, like we were enveloped in a 360-degree sunset.
The moon’s umbra — the darkest part of its shadow — was roughly 70 miles wide, traveling at 1,850 miles per hour. The totality began its path in North American in Oregon and left the coast of South Carolina within 93 minutes during the early afternoon. Spectators from all over the world gathered in rural communities like Hopkinsville, Ky., and Casper, Wyo.
Looking up from Clemson, a small college town in northwest South Carolina, the moon perfectly blotted out the sun. Venus appeared out of nowhere, blinking in the dark sky, as did planes and drones and satellites overhead. The sun’s corona shimmered, lurid and vibrant, as if trying to escape a black hole in the sky.
White, misty legs of light flared outward from the diamond ring. Beads, caused by the uneven curvature of the moon, twinkled at the edge. With planets visible in the dark sky, clouds blushing in maroon shades near the horizon and the ground enveloped in a cool twilight, it felt like dawn and dusk and evening all at once. What an unnerving sensation, including how the near 90-degree air cooled rapidly without the sun’s glare.
The thousands of spectators at Clemson University, all facing the southwestern sky with their heads cocked up the same way, looked like a throng of pilgrims here for a religious ceremony. But, if in ancient times the total solar eclipse was an ominous event, the one that occurred in a narrow band across the continental U.S. on Aug. 21, 2017, was marked by secularity and spectacle.
The crowd hooted and hollered as a response to the eclipse. Some students yelled out the Clemson University fight song, as if the event were nothing more than a football game. Spectators streamed their experience live on Facebook. The eclipse trended on Twitter and was a featured subreddit on Reddit.
But it didn’t matter how many people hyped up the event nor how many Snapchats were made of the eclipse. Seeing the moon impose itself against the sun felt like a strange accident, like happening upon something taboo. Many civilizations, after all, believed the eclipse was an act of incest, an unnatural coupling between cosmic brother and sister.
And the repetitive nature of the eclipse also connected one to all other moments in human history. Homer wrote in the “Odyssey,” supposedly documenting a 3,200-year-old eclipse: “The Sun has been obliterated from the sky, and an unlucky darkness invades the world.” Nat Turner envisioned a slave rebellion after interpreting the 1831 eclipse as an omen. In 1919, scientists used a solar eclipse to observe the bending of starlight by the sun’s gravity, proving Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.
The sun shined so brightly during the day the human eye couldn’t perceive anything else in the sky, even the moon that was right next to it. And so the eclipse offered viewers a moment of lucidity, in which the sky revealed itself to them.
When Venus emerged, the eclipse became less about the blotting out of the sun and more about the discovery of all else celestial. For nearly three minutes, all those stars and planets, previously hidden in plain sight, appeared out of nowhere. Standing in the shadow of the moon, we saw everything that was there all along.
At 2:40 p.m., the sun emerged from the eclipse like a waxing moon — a thin crescent expanding back to a full orb over the course of an hour. Americans won’t observe another total solar eclipse until 2024, when the path of totality will stretch from Dallas to Buffalo, N.Y. The Clemson crowd, knowing this will never happen again in this town in their lifetimes, lingered on the campus even after the sun returned to fullness.