Living in the Denver metro, I was lucky enough to be in the path of the annular eclipse that raced across a chunk of our continent this past Saturday.
Last time I experienced anything remotely like it was back in 2017, when we made a trip down to Nashville for the total solar eclipse. In my journal entry, I wrote:
Around 1:10, several minutes out from totality, the quality of light began to change. The thinness of the light made everything look faded: colors seemed to slacken and lose their brightness, and contrast seemed to bleed away, as if we were trapped in a faded photograph from the 70s. Shadows had a weird crispness to them that seemed abnormal.
The photograph bit is dead-on. The light had a dreamy, faraway quality to it.
It helps, too, to have a prompt to pay attention to something like that. Objectively, yes, the light was behaving oddly. But plenty of people in my neighborhood were going about their regular days, oblivious. Notice one thing and realize how much deeper that observation can go.
Taylor Coe 