The Eclipse

 Portland is a beautiful city which we had a great time exploring, but our primary purpose was to experience 99% totality in the eclipse. We were clearly not the only people with that idea but the spot we found was less crowded than we had feared (though we were in place by 6am just in case) It's also hard for anyone to get their head in your way when you're all looking at the sun, so personal viewing space was not a problem.

 The eclipse itself was incredible but in many ways different than I had expected. I had NOT thought the quality of the light would get so strange and diffused, or that you would feel a change in temperature so quickly. Somewhat naively I HAD expected a large shadow to move across the ground when in reality there is just a gradual darkening, because even 1% of the sun is pretty bright. My personal highlight was during near-totality when everyone was cheering and Kathryn shouted "WOOOOO!! UNIVERSE!!"

 I had also (somewhat foolishly) opted against getting a fancy (and expensive) solar filter. While we had no camera damage of any sort, all my photos were just giant flares. Fortunately, Kathryn captured some pretty cool blooms and edge glows like the picture above. As luck would have it, the fellow next to us that we'd spent the morning chatting with had a sheet of filter in a piece of cardboard you could drop over the end of your lens, and Kathryn used that to take a more classic eclipse photo as shown below.

Apologies for being so late getting these pictures up, the fall has been kicking both our butts, and finding the time and energy to even share a few pictures is tricky to do.