Eclipse

I know everyone named Adam has been waiting to see these photos, so here's the pics from the day of the eclipse (what a rhyme!)

So I started off by meeting Mus in this bamboo grove, because we planned to watch the eclipse on the beach. But like all plans, these were soon changed. First off, I was waiting in the grove and Mus came and he was frantic. He'd messed up on the time- he had thought we were metting an hour earlier than what we'd agreed on- so when I was an hour late, he was sure I had died or something and had ran off to find a phone.

But the bamboo grove was gorgeous. Ghana has the tallest bamboo I've ever seen. I know there's nothing to compare it to to see the size, but the bamboo in this picture is about 4-5 stories tall. I've been in some forests where there's a river and seen bamboo that was probably 10 stories tall.

So, as I said, our plans changed and we didn't watch it on a beach. We decided to go to the SIT building and watch from the roof there instead.

It's funny because the eclipse was going for a good 15 minutes before we noticed. I'd seen a solar eclipse once before- but it was a partial one and I had been maybe 10 years old at the time. So I didn't realize that you couldn't see the eclipse without glasses. I had thought it would get darker outside or something after it got going, but it didn't.

So finally we saw all these people outside in the courtyard, staring at the sun with their eclipse glasses, so we decided to put on the glasses and look too. By then, the sun was almost a quarter of the way blocked, but you still couldn't tell with the naked eye!

So here's a photo of when the sun was like a quarter of the way blocked. I tried to take a photo with my camera through the special glasses- but it didn't work. It was all dark.

Here's Mus and I pretending to be astounded at the sun (It really wasn't that cool when it was only partially blocked- the glasses made it so dark it looked like a black and white icon on a computer or something...)

Still, it was fun to sit on the roof and take pictures of each other wearing the silly glasses making funny faces...

But when it went dark, it was like- BAM! and all of the sudden it was really dark. It wasn't like evening at all because it wasn't gradual. Here's Mus dancing in the darkness...

The streetlights there must be on some sort of light sensor, because they all came on...

This is me and Kweku, Mus's best friend, during the total eclipse. You can see how dark it is around us- it really look slike night...

And I will admit, I did glance at the eclipse without the glasses. During the partial eclipse, the glasses were a must- otherwise, you wouldn't even know an eclipse was going on. But during the total eclipse, if you wore your glasses, you couldn't see it. The sky just looked black because the corona isn't bright enough to get through the glasses. And it looked awesome without the glasses- I just made sure to steal glances, and not stare.

It was kind of freaky, actually. I never realized how frightening it would be to see strange objects in the sky. We are used to instantly recognizing everything up there when we glance up, but the sun looked so foriegn when it was just a glowy halo, that it kinda made you shiver. If I hadn't know what it was or why it was happening, I probably would have thought that it was the end of the world....

Anyhow, I did take photos for all you unlucky ones who didn't get to see it-

This one I cropped out of the top photo, so you could see it better. You know, no matter the zoom, you just can never get those celestial bodies to fill a photo like you want them to.