Syzygy

SYZYGY: noun, a conjunction or opposition, especially the moon with the sun. "The planets were aligned in syzygy."

April 8, 2024, a day I had been eagerly awaiting for several years, came together most beautifully: e-learning day at school, three day visit from two besties from my Colorado years, and the perfect weather for a total solar eclipse!

The weekend started with two airport runs (thanks, airline screw-ups), and so we started the weekend in Indianapolis at the the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art and wandering around downtown and along the canal. 

This incredible carving of a bird in the museum was made out of a musk ox horn. 

And the musk ox carved out of stone. 

And incredible paintings! This one called Stillwater Crossing by Daniel Smith was so unbelievably life-like. What a treasure!

Sunday started with a huge risk: baking popovers with and without gluten. Boy, did they pop!! The secret - don’t open the oven door… They we delicious!

Alpaca visits after breakfast! They weren’t quite as hungry, but we all had patience to hand feed them until they slowly finished all their grain. 

On Monday, the weather looked great for viewing in the neighborhood, but the continuous eye on the NYT up-to-the-second weather map around lunch indicated that we were better off going with the original plan A to avoid slight cloud cover at the house. We raced to the Cardinal Greenway bike trail and hiked to the center of totality near Losantville. 

We set up next to the road and waited, enjoyed, and were awed by the changes we experienced. The light started to get very weird the closer we got to totality. It felt like something was on my glasses and needed to be wiped away. 

The air cooled significantly. I was hot in the sweater initially, but almost wished for a jacket the darker it got. The wind picked up a bit. We started hearing bugs get more active in the grass and peepers in a pond started chirping. The following images were taken on a phone with eclipse glasses in front of the lens. 

And then it got truly DARK 360° around us! Twilight was on every horizon all around the edges of the fields. We were super close to the road, and traffic stopped for the duration of darkness. I caught the light disappearing in a 360 video I took. The phone camera lightened everything, so the feeling of the darkness was not caught completely. It was amazing to see the solar flares on the edges of the sun, a complete surprise! The whole experience was magical and difficult to capture in words and images. It was awe-inspiring and beautiful! My whole school was elated for the rest of the week. Remarkable and special!

And just as soon as the sun came out on the other side of the moon, daylight was once again super bright. The change was immediate, even getting dark featured a longer time with the murky light. 

Small joke! 😉

And a few maps. The small purple “x” shows where we watched the eclipse. 

And the years each part of Indiana had seen a total eclipse before April 8:

Finally, a video of the totality by the Ball State Planetarium.

Several photos are the works of EB and NW. Thanks for sharing the best weekend with me!