First there is the experience of watching the darkness descend on you. It's like you can see a wall of it coming at you from a distance.
But viewing the corona of the sun... wow! I cannot begin to describe how cool that is. You don't get to see it in 99% totality. Only when the sun is completely blocked from space. It's remarkable and beautiful and impossible to capture the light on camera and you only get to see if for maybe a couple of minutes in your life.
It's entirely a natural lighting spectacle, so it's hard to capture the size and dynamic range on an LCD screen.
The pictures make it look like some sort of lens flare, but it looks nothing like that in real life. You can actually see the vapory tendrils of the suns' plasma making stringy loops around the sun in the pattern of the magnetic waves. There's a lot of detail.
Again, it's something you have to see for yourself. If you lived an entire life in a cave, me showing pictures of the sun would not have the same effect as actually feeling the light.
I was a skeptic when I went to the 2017 one. I've booked flights to go see next month's.
I had always assumed that corona photos like this are heavily processed in order to maximize the effect and that seeing one in real life would be more like "Eh, there's a sort of little ring thing in the sky."
Nope. During totality, the whole sky goes dark and you look up and there's a fucking ring of fire in the sky.
It looks exactly like these photos, just sitting there up in the sky. It feels like you got teleported to another solar system onto the surface of an alien planet.
Totally. The second I experienced totality, I instantly understood how it would have been a religious, cosmic experience for early humans who didn't have a scientific understanding of what's going on.
Imagine just going about your day as normal and all of a sudden the sun does that.
Seeing it is amazing, some of the photos are better than what you can see with your naked eye.
The feeling though, is very hard to convey. Everyone I was with confirmed that they felt it. Very primal to me. It was clear that my body (and the natural world around me) was unsettled or could tell that something was disrupted.
I'm not a "vibes" person, but for sure this was felt.
But viewing the corona of the sun... wow! I cannot begin to describe how cool that is. You don't get to see it in 99% totality. Only when the sun is completely blocked from space. It's remarkable and beautiful and impossible to capture the light on camera and you only get to see if for maybe a couple of minutes in your life.