Observatorio del Pangue: The first 2024 Total Solar Eclipse was in Texas : we've been there !

8:00am, first look through the windows of the motel, the sky is totally overcast, with dense, heavy dark clouds. 5.5 hours left until totality, and I feel good. The place is Camp Wood, a small village in the Texas country, some 150km west of San Antonio. It will be a long day, so let’s have a good breakfast. ... There is a restaurant just across the route 55, the road that runs through the town. No one from the left, no one from the right, actually no one anywhere, easy crossing… I don’t know what I’ll find beyond the door of the restaurant… Oh, everyone is here having breakfast ! There is no “eclipse feeling” though, it’s true that the forecast is not good, but I feel good.

The day before, we located the perfect site to watch the eclipse, a small public garden with a clear view all around, we arrived here early to get the right spot, although there was no need to hurry : we’ve been alone all the time !

11:00am, 2,5 hours until totality. Here we are, installed on the only public bench, and the sky is cloudy. Do I detect some breaks in the cloud mass? Yes, I do. The sky is becoming “partially cloudy”, with growing areas of blue sky. We can use now the binoculars to watch the Sun, that makes me feel good.

12:00pm, First Contact scheduled in 15 minutes more, now we anticípate the path of the clear areas to guess if one of them will coincide with the Sun at the right moment. And it did so : First Contact spotted through the binoculars, the tiny black limb of the Moon is definitely here. Whatever happens now, at least we’ve seen the 2024 Texas Eclipse!

But we want more. The Moon is progressing fast over the Sun, and the clouds still run all over : is there a chance after all that we witness the totality ? The partial phase lasts only 1 hour and 18 minutes, it seems factible, just need to keep looking at the shrinking of the Moon crescent.

01h28pm, totality in 4 minutes, and the Sun keeps swimming among the black clouds ! I tried something that should never be done : remove the filter from the binoculars, although not putting an eye to them, just watch from a prudential distance the extreme light that is in there. Some 25 seconds before totality the light dimmed enough to attempt a direct visión, and I saw something extraordinary that I never saw before : the Moon was not a crescent anymore, just a thin yellow line slightly curved, spanning some 10 degrees, and flying transversally behind the clouds (which actually were the ones moving…), it definitely looks like an alien spaceship, until it suddenly disappeared, replaced by the magnificent Sun corona surrounding the black disk of the Moon : totality ! We saw it, and I instantly realized that, no, until now I didn’t feel good at all, it was a nervous sensation… Surprisingly, the totality coincided with a cloudless area which lasted almost all the expected time. And we enjoyed it indeed.

Why is each total eclipse systematically indescribable ? Let me say at least that everything was there : the irregular lunar limb still playing with the sunlight for a couple of seconds, the delicate structure of the Sun corona, and, a few moments after the start of totality, the apparition of some prominences, one of them notably extended, displaying its particular mix of pink and purple, a spectacular colour that cannot be rendered by any picture, it can be appreciated only in live.
For this trip we had decided to make visual observing only, with Celestron SkyWatcher 15x70 binoculars, but Cristian is an astrophotographer and couldn’t help but sacrifice some precious seconds to take a few snapshots of the eclipse, although losing almost nothing of the live show.

We visited Los Angeles, and Venice Beach, we touched the actual De Lorean time machine, and a recovered piece of the Titanic body, we entered almost all the casinos of Las Vegas, we saw the cross marks where President Kennedy was shot in Dallas, we visited the Johnson Space Center in Houston (and, yes, we had a problem…), we rode on the desertic Route 66, but none of these memories will replace the feeling of those 4 minutes.

Yet the totality ended, the short straight line was back, soon replaced by a thin crescent Sun, but shortly after the sky became cloudy again, covering a large part of the final partial phase.

Nevertheless, I managed to watch the Last Contact through some thin transparent clouds, which allowed me to make a virtual connection with the next eclipse…

A few moments of the totality... (click to enlarge)