eclipse august 21, 2017

An old friend in Ohio said, "Believe me, I saw it." No, he saw eighty-five percent, a circle with a bite out of it. That is something else. You must see one hundred percent of a solar eclipse to experience the event. We didn't know before we traveled to Kentucky to be in the area of totality, to see the moon covering the sun one hundred percent, resulting in us seeing a black hole in the sky with a ring of fire. A magnificence that entranced the crowd in the field where we stood for the two-minute and thirty- second duration of the event.

I heard scientists trying to explain the eclipse beforehand and they were too practical. The eclipse appeared as dynamic and unimaginable as a special effect in a movie. We had no idea beforehand. M said it is difficult to put into words because it is beyond comparison to anything we had ever seen. The sun 400 times larger than the moon, and the moon passing the right distance from earth to exactly block the sun, leaving a black hole in the sky with a circular ring of fire, visible in the earthly path of total eclipse.

We stood in a field in Kentucky with a hundred people to see the total eclipse one hundred percent. There we witnessed what we couldn't have imagined. The people cheered, then became silent, in awe M called the vision unworldly, like nothing we had ever seen. I thought to explain it and the word I came up with is magical. I am sure every eclipse first-timer took home an impression they never expected to experience.