Eclipse Report from Ohio

 I am thankful we were in the path of totality and that there were only very light thin clouds, and that I got to see this rare event.

On the other hand, I have had many far more interesting, beautiful and photographic sunsets down by the lake shore.

What I found most interesting about the experience is its three-dimensional quality. One really had the sense of a physical body, the Moon, passing in front of the Sun. 

My iphone photograph:

The most enjoyable part was getting out my old telescope which I haven't used much since I was in high school. I did a practice set up on Sunday afternoon which helped much.

The telescope is a 2.4" refractor. Unfortunately my parents could only afford an altazimuth mount which means that one has to move the telescope in two directions. An equatorial mount aligns the telescope with the North Pole so that one only has to move the telescope in one direction as the earth rotates. 

Fortunately I have a lot of old carboard boxes. One just the right height to project the sun's image into, and the other put around the eyepiece to shade the larger box from ambient light.

 

Inside the large box is a white piece of cardboard duck taped to a flap of the box which unfortunately had to be hand-held in place.

Below is the telescope on eclipse day about halfway toward totality. Notice the small finder telescope on this side of the main telescope. Both cast shadows on the small box which shields the larger box into which the sun's image is being projected. Inside the dark shadow of the small telescope is a bright image of the partially eclipse Sun.

Here is a large picture of the finder shadow with the partially eclipsed Sun inside. Now the earth is constantly moving as the image of the Sun moves outside the shadow on the outside of this box, the image inside will also be moving out. The trick is to always constantly readjust the telescope to keep the Sun centered in the shadow of the finder telescope.

Below is the control center of the telescope.

The arrows indicate the wing nuts that control the up and down (top arrow) and right-left motions of the telescope. Loosing the wing nuts permits large movements to aim the telescope at the Sun. 

Once the wing nuts are tightened fine movement control is made by turning the two knobs inside the circle.  Since the Sun's apparent movement in the sky over an hour is quite large both the wing nuts and the fine controls have to be used in alternation.

Unfortunately, since someone (Betty) had to hold the cardboard in place in the large box, and someone (myself) had to be at the controls most of the time, I did not get many pictures of the images inside the box.  Those, like the large collection of sunset photographs might have made the event more exciting and memorable.

A SUPER SPREADER EVENT?

They were talking about a huge number of people coming into the Cleveland area with potential traffic jams afterward. Maybe that happened on the Interstates. What happened locally was the everyone stayed home to view the eclipse.  Actually, there was so little traffic that a silence descended upon the event much like during the pandemic. 

There was no school of Monday. Lakeland Community College closed its campus as did our parish with its school. Some communities did use their school stadium for a community event, however some restricted the unpaid admission to hometown residents.

The pandemic began in Cleveland before lockdown when a bunch of Republicans came back from a CPAC meeting in DC which had been a super spreader event. That continued a pattern during the pandemic of downtown Cleveland becoming infected which spread to the suburbs. Maybe that will happen again with this event? 

Of course if it happens the general population will not notice it, it will only be noticed in the spike of Covid related admissions among the elderly and immunocompromised.