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THE DAILY ASTORIAN • MONDAY, AUGUST 21, 2017
THE GREAT AMERICAN SOLAR ECLIPSE 2017
ECLIPSE
ODDITIES
Associated Press
Eclipse watchers
came to Oregon,
but no traffic
nightmare
Dire warnings of bumper-to-
bumper traffic on Oregon roads
failed to happen in the days lead-
ing up to the total solar eclipse.
And most travelers reached
their destination with relative ease
this morning.
But traffic clogged on some
roads as procrastinators headed
into the path of totality. The Ore-
gon Department of Transportation
said this morning that a 30-minute
drive from Redmond to Madras
on Highway 97 in central Oregon
took at least 75 minutes.
Officials were concerned about
jams following the eclipse. They
hope drivers will stagger their
departures, instead of all leaving
at once.
AP Photo/Don Ryan
The moon almost totally eclipses the sun during a near total solar eclipse as seen from Salem.
Millions converge across
the US to see sun go dark
The grandest of
cosmic spectacles
By MARCIA DUNN
Associated Press
A
mericans gazed in wonder through
telescopes, cameras and disposable
protective glasses today as the moon
blotted out the midday sun in the first full-
blown solar eclipse to sweep the U.S. from
coast to coast in nearly a century.
It promised to be the most observed and
photographed eclipse in history, with millions
staking out prime viewing spots and settling
into lawn chairs to watch, especially along
the path of totality — the line of shadow cre-
ated when the sun is completely obscured.
The shadow — a corridor just 60 to 70
miles wide — came ashore in Oregon and
then began racing diagonally across the con-
tinent to South Carolina, with darkness last-
ing only about two to three minutes in any
one spot.
“The show has just begun, people! What
a gorgeous day! Isn’t this great, people?” Jim
Todd, a director at the Oregon Museum of
Science and Industry, told a crowd of thou-
sands at an amphitheater in Salem, as the
moon seemed to take an ever-bigger bite out
of the sun and temperature soon dropped
noticeably.
With 200 million people within a day’s
AP Photo/Don Ryan
Catalina Gaitan, from Portland, tries to
shoot a photo of the rising sun through
her eclipse glasses at a gathering of
eclipse viewers in Salem this morning.
drive from the path of totality, towns and
parks braced for monumental crowds. Clear
skies beckoned along most of the route, to the
relief of those who feared cloud cover would
spoil this once-in-a-lifetime moment.
“It’s like nothing else you will ever see or
ever do,” said veteran eclipse-watcher Mike
O’Leary of San Diego, who set up his camera
along with among hundreds of other amateur
astronomers gathered in Casper, Wyoming.
“It can be religious. It makes you feel insig-
nificant, like you’re just a speck in the whole
scheme of things.”
Astronomers were giddy with excitement.
A solar eclipse is considered one of the grand-
est of cosmic spectacles.
NASA solar physicist Alex Young said the
last time earthlings had a connection like this
to the heavens was during man’s first flight
to the moon, on Apollo 8 in 1968. The first,
famous Earthrise photo came from that mis-
sion and, like this eclipse, showed us “we are
part of something bigger.”
With half hour to go before totality,
NASA’s acting administrator, Robert Light-
foot, enjoyed the moon’s “first bites out of
the sun” from a plane flying over the Ore-
gon Coast and declared it “just an incredible
view.”
“I’m about to fight this man for a window
seat,” Lightfoot said, referring to a fellow
NASA scientist.
The Earth, moon and sun line up perfectly
every one to three years, briefly turning day
into night for a sliver of the planet. But these
sights normally are in no man’s land, like the
vast Pacific or Earth’s poles. This is the first
eclipse of the social media era to pass through
such a heavily populated area.
The moon hasn’t thrown this much shade
at the U.S. since 1918, during the country’s
last coast-to-coast total eclipse. In fact, the
U.S. mainland hasn’t seen a total solar eclipse
since 1979 — and even then, only five states
in the Northwest experienced total darkness.
“It’s really, really, really, really awesome,”
said 9-year-old Cami Smith as she watched
the fully eclipsed sun from a gravel lane
near her grandfather’s home at Beverly
Beach.
Eclipse: ‘It’s just not the same until you see it’
Continued from Page 1A
“A lifetime event. It’s better in
a group,” said Sue Farmer, who
watched with several others in the
parking lot of the Astoria Library
downtown.
At the Astoria Column
As clouds rolled away from the
hills surrounding the Astoria Column
about 8 a.m. this morning, cars carry-
ing eclipse viewers rolled in.
Workers at the Column were not
entirely sure what to expect. “Happy
Eclipse Day,” two gift shop employ-
ees said to each other when the shop
opened.
The gift store opened an hour
early, and park host Fred Pynes said
he fielded many questions about the
eclipse from visitors over the week-
end. But about an hour before the
event began, clouds were just start-
ing to disappear and not a lot of peo-
ple had arrived. “We thought we
were really going to get hammered,”
Pynes said.
But as the morning progressed,
the parking lot filled to the point
where park staff started double-park-
ing drivers and traffic at the top of
Coxcomb Drive stalled.
Jim Richardson, a park keeper
at the Column who lives in Astoria,
said the influx of visitors would be
good for the Column. Of course, if
any of the eclipse doomsday scenar-
ios that had been theorized actually
happened, it might not have made
much of a difference.
“We’re all going to disintegrate
at 10:30 anyway,” Richardson said
with a laugh.
When the moment of near total-
ity took place just after 10:15 a.m.,
the sky turned to dusk, the hundreds
of viewers became quieter, birds
stopped chirping and the surround-
ing trees changed tint.
“It’s goofy the way it looks,”
said Dale Walluski, who lives near
the Clatsop County Fairgrounds. “I
know I’m not sick, but for a moment
you feel like you are.”
As the sky brightened seconds
after the moment ended, eclipse
viewers began hurrying to their cars
to escape the traffic. Within the next
few hours, it was just another sunny
day at the Column.
At the Peter Iredale
Many of the people who watched
the eclipse at the Peter Iredale ship-
wreck in Fort Stevens State Park
near Warrenton ended up here by
accident. One family sitting near the
wreck, a sleeping bag spread over
their laps, said they often come down
from their home in Enumclaw, Wash-
ington, to camp. This year, they just
happened to make a reservation that
overlapped with the eclipse.
Thomas Dietrich of Tacoma,
Washington, drove down with his
son and their dog Sunday night. As
he had hoped, they avoided much of
the traffic by leaving later in the day.
They found a campsite in the park,
but hadn’t been able to find eclipse
glasses. Everywhere they checked
was sold out.
This didn’t phase Dietrich’s
6-year-old son, Thomas, though.
“I just want to feel the temperature
drop!” he said.
Temperatures started to drop and
the light became dim and purple.
Groups of people appeared and dis-
appeared in swirls of marine fog. The
beach looked like another planet in
the murky twilight. Two dogs raced
across the dunes, intent on the chase,
oblivious to anything else.
Then, just as Chris and Kyle Car-
roll of Scott City, Kansas, felt they
had begun to really notice the eerie
light, it was over. The pockets of sky
visible through the fog turned back
to blue and people took off their
glasses.
“We didn’t think it was going to
be a very big deal, but that was really
cool,” Kyle Carroll said. She remem-
bered looking at a pinhole setup as a
kid, but said looking through glasses
provided a completely different
experience.
Chris Carroll joked that it was
still kind of like Christmas.
“There’s such a big buildup and
then, OK, I opened my presents, time
to go back to bed.”
At Haystack Rock
Without context, seeing all of the
beach chairs in Cannon Beach facing
away from the ocean this morning
would have seemed strange.
But beachgoers today turned
their back on the Pacific to watch the
eclipse. While there weren’t hordes
of people, eclipse enthusiasts slowly
trickled onto the sand with beach
chairs and solar glasses waiting for
the sky to go dark.
People huddled in blankets and
put on more sweatshirts as the day-
time sky began to dim and tempera-
tures chilled. Across the beach, faces
looked upward, mouths open with
awe. Hotel employees in full uni-
form jogged onto the beach, glasses
in hand, for the brief show.
Within seconds Haystack Rock
was enshrouded in fog, the ocean
fallen into darkness. The birds
stopped flying, and all anyone could
hear was the crash of the ocean
waves.
“It’s pretty impressive. You intel-
lectually know what is happening,
but it’s just not the same until you
see it,” Jeff Skinner, of Seattle, said
as the eclipse approached its peak.
Elleda Wilson contributed to this
report.
Dutch Bros
Coffee recalls
eclipse glasses
Dutch Bros. Coffee has issued
a recall notice of all of its eclipse
glasses.
The Idaho Statesman reported
the Oregon-based coffee company
handed out eclipse glasses Sunday
at many of its locations. But the
company issued a recall after dis-
covering the certification of safety
was questionable.
The company posted the recall
notice on its Facebook page,
warning customers not to use the
glasses to view the solar eclipse.
Dutch Bros. is encouraging
customers to return the glasses to
one of its locations in exchange
for a free drink of any size.
Vermont
woman finds
letter describing
1918 eclipse
BURLINGTON, Vt. — A Ver-
mont woman says she’s discovered
a letter describing the 1918 eclipse
that was written by her great-grand-
father the day after it took place.
Jennifer Nachbur says the letter
written by Arthur Wells, an attor-
ney and astronomy buff who was
in the “zone of totality” in Baker
City, Oregon, for the June 8, 1918,
eclipse. That eclipse was the last
time there was a coast-to-coast
total eclipse in the United States.
A similar eclipse will cross the
continent Monday.
Nachbur told WPTZ-TV she
discovered the letter written to her
great-grandmother in the fami-
ly’s summer home in Keene, New
York.
In the letter Wells described the
red and yellow rays of the sun and
wrote, “the effect on the cloud and
landscape was beyond my power
of description.”
Post offices
offer special
postmarks
BOISE, Idaho — More than
110 U.S. Postal Service offices
are offering special postmarks for
Monday’s total solar eclipse.
The post offices are in or near
the path of the full eclipse, which
cuts across the United States, from
Oregon to South Carolina.
Spokesman Mark Saunders
says the postmarks will be unique
in some locations, while most will
use one designed by the national
office. He says some post offices
are using the special postmark
only on Monday but others are also
using it before and after the eclipse.
U.S. Postal Service
This undated image provided
by the United States Postal
Service shows a template of
a postmark commemorat-
ing the Aug. 21, 2017 solar
eclipse over the United States.