Total solar eclipse of August 21, 2017

In August 2017 we were driving through the eastern part of the States and stopped by Great Smoky Mountains National Park. After everything we had already seen in America, it couldn’t surprise us, but after the heat and humidity of the coast it was easy to breathe there, and we enjoyed hiking a few trails.

We left the park and wanted to spend the night at a campground in Nantahala National Forest, but everything there was taken. We had to look for another place, and we stopped at a nice rest area by the highway, in the same national forest, near the town of Andrews in North Carolina.

And on August 21 a total solar eclipse happened over the USA. The path of totality crossed the whole country, from the Pacific coast of Oregon to the Atlantic coast of South Carolina; an eclipse hadn’t crossed all of the States like that since 1918. People traveled hundreds of miles to get to where it would be visible.

During the day there wasn’t a single free parking spot left at our rest area. In the field next door people set up tents, umbrellas, and folding chairs, and some brought special telescopes for observing the sun. Everyone was waiting and chatting, and many were wearing eclipse T-shirts.

And we saw it, and it was great. It got dark all around, not like at night but like at dusk, and it immediately became a little cooler. Where the sun had been, the dark disk of the moon hung in the sky, surrounded by the corona.

We didn’t manage to photograph the eclipse itself: in the pictures the sun is just a bright spot.

But we were shooting a time-lapse with a camera, and the eclipse is somewhat visible in it. Only the total phase made it into the video, though, and the camera didn’t catch the moon creeping over the sun.

And the shadows of the leaves on the road turned into a scattering of tiny crescents.

That same day we got lucky with a place to stay: we found a very pleasant forest campground, where we pitched our tent.