Did you see it? Did you get to see the eclipse? The place I chose to travel to in order to see the eclipse was Sweetwater Tennessee and boy did I pick the right spot. Two minutes and thirty-seven seconds of totality in an absolutely cloudless sky. Those are two minutes and thirty-seven seconds that I will never forget.
Now Sweetwater is a pretty little town just about thirty miles south of Knoxville, Tennessee with a population of 5,764. The townspeople knew this was going to be a big event for them and they made sure that they were ready. The main street of the town had been blocked off for the eclipse and a small park across the street was laid out with food vendors, people selling souvenirs and artists with their goods.
Every available parking spot had been opened up for visitors at reasonable rates, I paid $20, and the money that was collected for parking mostly went to local charities. The pictures below shown the main street and park before the crowd really started coming.
I wanted to be certain to arrive early so I got to Sweetwater at 8AM, that’s when the pictures were taken. Finding myself a nice spot in the shade of a cafe to wait for the show to start, I quickly made friends with a father and son; both named Glenn, from Houston and Baton Rouge who had actually arrived in Sweetwater at 2AM. They really wanted to be sure to get a good spot! I also met people from Pittsburgh, Detroit and New York along with several from nearby Knoxville and Chattanooga. The town hasn’t yet published any estimate of the number of visitors, if they do I’ll add it later, but I’d say that at least 15,000 people came.
In the early morning there were no clouds of any kind so with the bright August Sun the day quickly became fairly hot. Soon anyone who wasn’t actually buying something was staying in the shade where a nice breeze made it fairly comfortable. A few clouds started rolling in about noon and by around 1PM as the partial eclipse was starting you could hear a few people whisper, ‘I hope it doesn’t get any worse’. Well, it got better, by 2:30 and the start of totality there was an absolutely clear sky. Perfect viewing for something I’ve wanted to see my whole life.
I did take my solar telescope and managed to get some decent videos of the partial eclipse. The videos are all too large to imbed so I’ll just have to add a single frame image from one video. (If you look closely on the Sun’s left side you can see a small Sunspot.)
Once totality started however I didn’t want to waste time fiddling with the solar telescope and just took a few of images with the same camera I used to take the pictures of Sweetwater. The best image is below.
As I said, Sweetwater got two minutes and thirty-seven seconds of totality, that’s just five seconds less than the maximum time for the eclipse anywhere in the US. That was enough time for me to find the four planets, Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter that became visible as the Sunlight was blocked by the Moon. Think of it, seeing four planets arching across the sky at 2:30 in the afternoon!
I have no doubt you can find better images of the eclipse very easily on the internet, I’ve never been much of a photographer and surely millions of people were taking pictures. These are mine however, and mean more to me than I can say. Yes I spent four days traveling to Tennessee and back and yes the traffic jam after the eclipse was the worst I have ever experienced. Nevertheless, I will always remember the town of Sweetwater because it was there I saw my first total eclipse of the Sun.