One year after the Solar Eclipse

Author’s Note: This post will mostly be a reminiscent story, but there’s some weather data down at the bottom if you’re interested.

One year ago today, a childhood dream of mine came true – to see a total solar eclipse. I’m not sure when I first learned about this “Great American Eclipse” that would happen in 2017 except that it was in elementary school. It’s not that I was waiting for just any eclipse, either. No, I was looking forward to this specific one. Over a decade later, I happened to find myself living in St. Anthony, Idaho for the eclipse. I wonder what my elementary school self would have thought if he knew that I would live within the path of totality.

I saw my first partial solar eclipse on April 8, 2005, when I was in the fifth grade. I guess I better mention that the only reason I know any of the eclipse dates is because I looked them up while writing this. It was just a partial eclipse at my home in Abilene, Texas, and while it wasn’t quite as spectacular as the total eclipse, it was certainly memorable. In case you’re wondering, the path of totality crossed Panama, Colombia, and Venezuela.

I can remember looking out the window at the sun setting partially eclipsed. My younger siblings didn’t seem too terribly interested, but I was. My science teacher had told us that we needed to look at it through special glasses, or that we could hold up a piece of paper to look through. I tried the paper thing to start, but it didn’t give me what I wanted, so despite what any scientist would suggest I went ahead and stole frequent glimpses through a pair of cheap sunglasses. I highly recommend not doing that.

On May 20, 2012, I almost got to see another eclipse, but unfortunately, it was cloudy in the Tri-Cities that afternoon. I was hoping that I would at least be able to notice the shadow moving across the overcast sky (the path of this annular eclipse took it near Medford), but I couldn’t tell the difference.

So we’ll fast forward to one year ago. I was going to school at BYU-Idaho and was the president of the Amateur Radio Society there. We had been contacted by some students in the Physics department for advice and help with a high altitude balloon they were launching to 100,000 feet up to get some pictures of the eclipse for the planetarium on campus. Our job was to track the balloon using APRS (which is explained in this blog post).

We had practiced several times during the summer to try to pin down our prediction and tracking skills and decided to set up our mission control on the south side of campus on a hill overlooking the upper Snake River Plain. We all sat there in excited anticipation, both because sending stuff to the edge of space is cool and because eclipses are awesome.

As the sky got strangely dark, one thing that I didn’t expect to happen was to see the shadow quickly move across the Snake River Plain from the mountains about 60 miles to our west. One of the most interesting things for me was how cold it got. Most folks know that 69 degrees in broad sunshine is fairly warm, but the same temperature under overcast skies can be pretty chilly. As more of the sun became obscured, it started to feel like it was overcast because of the lack of solar radiation we were receiving.

Not only did it feel colder, but it really was colder. I watched the weather station we had at mission control drop by nine degrees. The weather station at the Fremont County Courthouse in St. Anthony recorded a drop from 71.4 to 64.2.

Even more interesting than that, though, was the fact that the temperature continued to drop even after totality had ended! When totality began in St. Anthony, the temperature was 67.3. The minimum of 64.2 didn’t actually happen until 11:52 am – nearly 20 minutes after totality ended. While this may seem surprising, it’s fairly simple to explain. Even though the sun was shining again afterword, it was still significantly weaker than it would be without the moon in the way.

The temperature didn’t reach the pre-eclipse value of 71.4 until 12:52, which was an hour after the minimum, nearly an hour and twenty minutes past totality, and about two hours and twenty minutes after it began to drop.

I look forward to the next total eclipse in the United States, which will run from Texas to the Canadian Maritimes on April 8, 2024. If you missed the one in 2017, you should definitely make an attempt to be there for this one!

Thanks for reading my exceptionally rambly post! If you’re interested, my fellow WeatherTogether blogger Charlie wrote a blog post last year about his eclipse experience in Silverton, Oregon.