Sun - Mon, Aug 20 - 21: Madras, Oregon for the Eclipse

Our Great American Eclipse Adventure

BLT at Yaks in Dunsmuir. Best BLT I've ever had.  They also make their own ketchup and potato chips.  Yum!!

Sunrise - we stayed 4 hours away so we were up at 2 am and drove to Madras to avoid any bad traffic and to be sure we arrived on time.  There was no traffic so we arrived at sunrise.

Madras Oregon is in the center of the Totality Zone. Let the fun begin.

Big event at the Madras High School with talks by the scientists from Lowell Observatory. And clear views of a cloudless sky.

Some shots of the sun before the eclipse started. 

The faint corona is visible with a long shutter time.

The main viewing area was the football field.  The field and stadium were pretty full.  They ran the game clock to countdown to Totality.  We are at 61 minutes to Totality

Partial eclipse has started.

Curtesy of NASA – they captured the International space station transit during the eclipse.  The station is the little dot on the face of the sun, below and right of the three sunspots.

The crescent sun gets smaller and smaller.

30 minutes to Totality.

Moon looks about half gone when viewed through our funky eclipse glasses, or the eclipse binoculars.

7 minutes to go. It's getting colder and the lighting is definitely different. Cool!!

Taking photos with an eclipse filter over the lens.

Counting down to totality.

And the crowd went wild.  It is twilight dark!

Totality.  In the totality photo, the small red near the edge are solar prominences, tongues of hot hydrogen gas. (Paul's photo looked just like the one we later saw on NASA's website!!!  Yeah!!)

During total eclipse apparently stars are visible but we were too busy looking at the sun to look for the stars.  And it got colder, but again, too enthralled to notice.  And animals behave like its becoming night, not that we would have noticed in the football field anyway.  Well, there is always 2024.

Learned something new today from one of the Lowell scientists. We had an occulation today.  An occultation is an event that occurs when one object is hidden by another object that passes between it and the observer. An eclipse is the result of either an occultation (completely hidden) or a transit (partially hidden).

Regardless of what it was called, it was really awesome.

Traffic heading home? Not so much.  We left  Madras right after Totality ended, as did hordes of others.

Traffic as far as we could see.

Some of the "accommodations" in the fields around Madras.

At end of 1 hour - 10 miles very slow.

At one point we got off the main road and tried some of the country roads.  This is a view of the main road from our detour.  The detour moved for a while and then it came to a standstill as well..

End of 2nd hour – 11 more miles (21 total) not much better.

End of 3rd hour- 15 more miles (36 total) still slow.

At 4 hours 40 min – 44 more miles (80 total), now we are moving - 26 mph for the last hour and 40 minutes 😒.

Since we were looking at getting home after midnight and had gotten up at 2am, we gave up and got a room (one of the over priced ones), and went home the next day.