PakledHostage

I am back at my hotel after 5 hours stuck in post eclipse traffic. But the eclipse was awesome! What stood out to me about this one was how cold it got ahead of the eclipse. Others in the community park where we watched from commented on that too. Also, it struck me how gradual the onset was. The previous two that I saw were members of the same saros series, so they followed the same pattern. The sun and moon were a lot closer in size in those two, so by geometry the onset was sudden. This one, the moon was a lot bigger (closer) so it took several seconds for the light to decay. My family and I watched from a community park in a hamlet in Quebec. We had flawless blue skies. @JoeSchmuckatelli's advice to just pick a community ballpark was good advice. The park ended up filling up with people who stopped to go pee while enroute somewhere else, and then decided to stay. I had a six pack of Corona with me to celebrate afterwards. I shared them around and made some new friends. My kids were awestruck. My wife darted around taking photos with her phone. I left my camera in the bag and just enjoyed the moment. It was perfect.

You said I-40 was bad, but... maybe slow down?

I just got to my hotel in the path of totality (not in New York state). Mostly New York plates in the car park.

I think after this one, I am going to have to wait until 2044 and 2045 (hopefully we all stay healthy until at least then). 2045 will be the same saros series as the Sahara eclipse in 2027, will sweep across the US much like the 2017 one, and it will be in mid August.

I expect 2026 in Spain will be quite short because it's close to sunset. 2027 across the Sahara will be great because it's going to be clear and it's a long eclipse, but that also means it will be expensive, because reasons. Not sure about 2028. It passes through arid parts of Australia, but it happens in the Austral winter.

Good luck. I think we're all going to need it. It's April.

Firesmoke.ca is a good resource for mapping forest fire smoke in North America. I don't think it's great either, but I can see how it could be arrived at if someone didn't put much thought into it. Click on a location on the map and choose "meteogram" from the popup. That'll give you an atmospheric cross section w.r.t. time at the clicked upon location. It extends for about 4 days into the future.

Well, clouds are white, light gray, not quite so light gray, etc., don't you know?...

I should also add that another good weather site for eclipse chasers is MeteoBlue. They have an "aviation and clouds" micro-meteorology page that's an aggregate of several forecast models and other data. They tend to be pretty accurate in my local area. Edit: Northern Arkansas, north of Little Rock, is looking good at the moment, according to MeteoBlue.

@tater: is Missouri too far of a drive for you? Probably 20-24 hours one way?

I should add, to take us back to the topic of how amazing totality is for people, that my wife was actually the main motivator for our decision to go. She was so blown away by the last one in 2017 ("it is the most amazing thing I've ever seen in my life", she says, and she's more of a biological sciences type so that's saying something) that she wants our kids to experience it now that they're old enough to remember it.

I got flights for $2200, hotel for $500 and a rental car for $400. It's a lot of money to spend for what some would argue isn't worth it, but my wife and I decided on a whim to just do it so here we are. We're not "sit on the beach in Hawaii" people anyway, so we'll do a cheap vacation this summer (like a multi-day canoe trip that won't even have camping fees) and blow our vacation budget on this.

I had originally looked at flying to San Antonio and driving to the Kerrville area, but now we're headed to the north-east instead. Hotel is $500 for 4 nights. I expect it would be 4 times that if I booked it now.

I am taking my two out of school and flying them across the continent for it. Friends and acquaintances think I am nuts, but they obviously haven't experienced totality.

Trouble is, the path of totality runs down the middle of Lake Ontario. To get to a small town's ballpark from Toronto requires traveling east or west along the lake to its ends, along with 1 million other people. Maybe if one had a boat, but I'd be careful about that because you don't want to get into a potentially overloaded vessel, a dozen kilometers from shore.

Yeah. Shame. But you've got time. If you miss this one, you can try for another in some years time.

Yeah, as others have said, get into the path of totality. Crawl there if you have to... Words can't do it justice. You have to see it to understand.

The plane spotter YouTube channel LA Flights was able to track yesterday's Falcon 9 launch out of Vandenberg for about 4.5 minutes, from when it crested the terrain until well after staging. See timestamp 10:11:55 seconds in the video for the launch as it appeared from LAX: https://www.youtube.com/live/gvEbKaEz2ss? Edit: it won't let me embed the video for some reason. It gives me an error about my message containing an emoji, so the link above will have to suffice.

Why? I don't understand?

It's not necessarily a write off anyway. The visible damage is above the water line and I haven't heard anything in the news about it taking on water. I do recall reading years ago, however, that the value of the cargo on one of those ships can exceed a billion dollars. The cargo on Dali is presumably just tied up for a bit until they can get it off her and onto another ship, though.

This is why we won't have fusion power plants before 2040 or Mars colonies either. 2040 is 16 years from now. Evidently it takes that long to build large scale examples of established technology like bridges or subway lines, let alone cutting edge stuff.

I do think you will see the people responsible for infrastructure (like bridge and power line support towers) that are potentially vulnerable to collisions by ships to take a serious look at it. They'll at least do enough to cover their butts in case something happens on their watch... They'll commission an engineering study, write a report, seek government funding for the improvements recommended in the engineering study, they'll be denied the necessary funding, then they'll place the report and funding denial documents in a safe place to be pulled out if there's ever a problem.

Casual Navigation has already done a video on this. He tries to stick to the known facts. (His videos are always of high quality.)

I just think there's a lot of jumping to conclusions going on here. The TSB supposedly hasn't even gotten on-site yet, because rescue crews are still looking for the missing road workers. It seems in poor taste to wag fingers now already. But that's just my opinion. As you were.

The engines were built by Boeing... Seriously people.