#there was a whole page dedicated to sliders from 0-100 on “whether or not the eclipse changed your view on certain groups of people”

[hypershadicman]

just finished watching Red @comicaurora's newest video on the eclipse video and dear god i have THOUGHTS because the eclipse really was incredibly fucking magical (link below if you haven't seen it already)

so i happen to currently be living in an area where the path of totality was going directly over, i didn't have to go out of my way to see the eclipse and admittedly much like Red, i doubt i would've searched it out if it wasn't coming right to my exact doorstep. Unlike Red however, i had absolutely no idea what i was getting into, aside of course from Red's last eclipse video which put me on to the fact that i'd be in the right place at the right time; i brought up a telescope with no solar filter assuming that "surely i'll be fine if i wear my glasses" (i was advised against it once i got there, so i did not melt my telescope), i had no expectations and no preparations whatsoever essentially.

but fucking hell it was beautiful, i realized very quickly that i had absolutely no way to capture the real effect of it with my shitty phone camera, the sheer vastness of it all was overwhelming but i think the thing that really got to me is just how indescribable it felt. How was i supposed to explain this to my family and friends who weren't in the area, counting on me to send them something back to capture the experience? how could i even find the words?

so hearing quite literally some of the exact same descriptions from Red was quite possibly one of the most gratifying things i could've imagined. it was like there was just a hole in the sky, it was this oddly ethereal pale, the rim dotted with little pinkish red somethings that i still couldn't believe were real when i looked at them. it really was suddenly just night time in the middle of the day and i had absolutely no way to share it with anyone, not to the extent that i saw it.

so uh, thank you to Red for letting me know that someone else gets it, i hope that everyone else who saw it feels a little bit less alone knowing that we all got to share a moment like that, and i hope anybody who didn't gets to see something that beautiful at least once in their lives.

oh, and for anybody who made it this far down into this clumsy rant, i may not have been able to get a good shot of the eclipse, but a friend of mine with a 4K camera captured a full 2 hour video of the whole thing, beginning to end. i don't think it could ever compare to the real thing, but it is by far the closest i think it's really possible to get.

(apologies if dropbox is a little unwieldy to use here, or if the quality isn't quite up to snuff, i've had to take this through a youtube video converter so it probably got caught up in youtube compression a bit)