We awoke to partly sunny skies. After a wonderful breakfast with our friends, we headed off together to view the eclipse at our friend’s brother’s house in the next town over. Surprisingly, the traffic was much lighter than we expected. Like yesterday, there were no traffic slow-downs or accidents and we sailed right on through. Possibly it was due to the predictions of poor weather for viewing the eclipse.

Mother Nature fully cooperated and we were extremely fortunate. Despite heavy cloud cover at the beginning of the eclipse, the clouds parted and seemed to disappear just in time for the eclipse to reach totality, and we were able to clearly see the corona and the “diamond”. The viewing conditions remained good during the remainder of the eclipse. With intermittent cloud cover, we were able to clearly view all phases of the eclipse. It was eerie to watch the sky gradually darken in the middle of the afternoon and to “hear” the silence – the birds stopped chirping and the insects were quiet. We felt truly privileged to again witness a solar eclipse. I tried to get photos of the eclipse, but my camera was not up to the task. All the photos showed a big round circle of light even when the moon was dead center. However, Peggy’s camera did a much better job as the photo below shows.

Solar Eclipse, 8 April 2024

The remainder of the day was spent just visiting and having a delightful time with good friends.