Planning for the 2024 Great American Solar Eclipse began more than a year before April 8. Although the path of totality would pass over my brother's house near Buffalo, NY, I opted to travel to Texas in hopes of clear skies. The importance of a clear sky cannot be overemphasized when discussing the observation of totality. Eclipse chasers try to get close to the center line of the path of totality to maximize the duration of totality. And Those Who Know ... know that the difference between 99.9% totality and actual totality (100%) cannot be expressed in words.
My friend and fellow retired physics teacher, Dan Burns, was looking at North Waco as an option. I refreshed hotel reservation sites regularly hoping for availability. I expanded the search area and found a Hyatt east of Dallas that had opened their availability for the April 6-9 window. It seems they didn't know what they had. While other lodging options in the path of totality were harvesting dollars as best they could, tripling their normal rates, Hyatt was asking $105/night. Dan and I jumped on the deal.
We both made road trips of the journey to Dallas. Mine started in Bozeman and stopped by the Garden of the Gods (Colorado Springs) en route to Dallas. I made a slow journey back to Bozeman via red rock country. Arches, Canyonlands, Monument Valley, Vermilion Cliffs, Canyon de Chelly, Chaco Canyon, and Flaming Gorge were among the "detours."
A month later, the aurora filled the skies over North America. Montana was "in the zone." I found some dark skies near Bozeman, but the northern lights were blazing nicely over the city, too. From The Headwaters of the Missouri State Park, you felt like you were under an umbrella of aurora. We had additional decent shows in August and October.
Here's the HTML export from my Keynote slideshow of all this stuff. You show be able to advance it easily enough in your browser. It behaves nicely for me in Safari and Firefox. And decently on my iPad (once I updated to iPadOS 18.2.1). HTML exports from Keynote can sometimes be a little laggy on advancing. I use the forward arrow key to advance things on my computer and just tap the screen on my iPad.
Aurora to Eclipse 2024 [HTML export from Keynote]
If you cannot get the HTML version to play nicely, here's a movie export posted to YouTube. It plays on its own; you can pause and unpause as needed.
Aurora to Eclipse 2024 [Movie export from Keynote]
Ex-Genesis guitarist, Steve Hackett was playing a concert in Dallas two days before the eclipse, so I was able to see that.
In the video capture of our "Eclipse Party" in the Hyatt's back yard, Dan was just off the left side of the screen. The enthusiastic gentleman on the right of the screen turns out to be the brother of a teacher colleague I worked with at Rio. He texted his brother once we figured out our random connection, and his brother complimented me with a colorful characterization.
Our sense of euphoric relief cannot be overstated. We thought we might get completely blocked from totality. And we had planned long in advance and traveled great distances to be there. Dan had several family members with him. Whew!
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