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Sunday, May 20, 2012

Solar Eclipse

I had not even realized that this was coming up until a friend of mine posted something on facebook about a week and a half ago. Had it not been for my friends, I probably would have forgotten about it and not seen it.... and this only happens every 10 or 11 years. Not only that, but you are not always in "The Sweet Spot". I didn't even realize there would be a difference of where you viewed it from, but there is. My friends were not satisfied with viewing the solar eclipse from Provo, we had to go to the sweet spot... and where was that sweet spot? Kanarravile Utah, which is about 3 hours south of us.

We left around 3pm today so that we could get there in time to set up a spot to view the eclipse at 7:32 and have a little BBQ (thank goodness Jay has a portable BBQ). The trip there went fast because Jay brought his ipad and we watched Star Wars Episode V in the back seat. When we got there, I was shocked at what we saw... THOUSANDS of people all in Kanarravile. That town has probably never had that many people there.... ever. This is Kanarravile...


While we were there setting up, we had some people come by and ask us where we came from and we told them Provo. They were going around asking everyone and they said there were a lot of people from the east coast ... people from all over... they said they even talking to some people who came from Australia. Crazy right? With that many people, it was really fun to people watch. Here is a little of what I saw....


When we left, the line of cars was never ending. It was insane how many people were there. I was just not expecting that at all.


Here are my friends that I went with. Jay, Rich, Liz and Steph were great company for the car ride and the event.


Like I said, Jay brought his BBQ and we had chicken. Liz's corn got left behind on accident... along with some other items... like the silverware. So we ate the chicken with our hands, what was even more fun was eating Steph's dessert with our hands. Pretty amusing actually.



Then it was viewing time. Just like you can't just stare at the sun, you obviously can't just stare at the eclipse, but this is an epic event! What do you do if you don't have all the fancy equipment? Well, you can do back what you learn in school and use two pieces of white paper like this... *see light on the paper to know where the eclipse is at*


We saw a lot of people using welding masks... which we also brought one to use.



What we mostly used was a little card that Jay's roommate bought and let us use. This card is also how I got my pictures (so glad I brought my camera because I almost didn't because I didn't think that I would be able to get good pictures). Taking a picture of the eclipse without the card looked like this...


Holding the card right against the lens made it look like this...


But if I held the card out and then zoomed in on it, it looked the best. I tried to take several pictures leading up to the actual eclipse. *my collage maker program wouldn't let me put them in order, but you get the point*


And BAM, the Ring of Fire! It was awesome. During the ring of fire, we heard a kid across the street that said "My precious" ha ha. I love being around tons of random people.


Here we all are enjoying the eclipse together. It was awesome. It was 6 hour drive round trip, but it was worth it, we had a good time. Plus, now I can cross off my summer bucket list that I went somewhere random. On the way home I sat up front with Rich. While the people in the back were either reading, or sleeping... we were singing and car dancing to Disney songs (since we didn't have Disney movie night) , Queen, Billy Joel, Journey and other good tunes. I had a blast and was really thankful that I was invited to go along. :)



5 comments:

Lil Lizzie said...

love the pics!! you did good. i especially love the collage of the 4 of us...jay looks super legit. i'm so glad i woke up for the last bit of the sing-a-long. billy joel and journey...doesn't get much better than that :)

Abby Wright said...

My precious made me laugh!

Bethany said...

So cool!! Those pictures are awesome!

Kayleigh said...

Wow, your pictures are awesome! I love the ring of fire!

jamie hixon said...

Super fun. I think I looked at the eclipse for like two minutes through our special glasses, and that was it for me. But if it was more of an "event" - and I was going to be where I could see the ring of fire... now that might have been something. I wonder if that kid was just waiting to use that line, or if he thought of it in the moment. Hilarious either way.