We had our weekly Zoom chat April 7th. Gareth said “Today’s clear sky was great for eclipse photo dry runs… Spent hours fussing with cardboard filter-adapters and such.” He’s the only one of us living in the Zone of Totality.

Sandy and I weren’t in the zone of totality, and we’d heard we’d only get about an 86% eclipse. We sat on the porch for the duration. Assuming only 14% of sunlight, we’d expected our afternoon to get much darker than the slight reduction we experienced. Another puzzle for me was it seemed as though the moon didn’t cross the sun in a straight line. It entered the sun from the lower right, seemed to move straight right-to-left, then veered upwards and departed from the top middle. (Somebody living only a few miles from us made a Facebook post showing exactly how we saw the eclipse.) Gareth thought if we’d viewed the eclipse at noon from the equator, then the path might have been straight.

Another view, via Facebook and a NASA website: