Total eclipse 2024

or how I ended up driving twelve hours to Vermont and back for the weather

Sunday in Syracuse would have been a great day for a solar eclipse. Clear blue skies. Comfortable temperatures. Couldn’t ask for better.

But that wasn’t eclipse day. It was rehearsal day.

I tried out my two cobbled-together pinhole cameras. One shorter with a smaller but brighter image than the other.

Monday would be the day the total eclipse band would take in Syracuse. Monday’s weather? Not so good.

By late the previous week the Weather Service website was still saying “Mostly sunny,” but on closer examination that meant it would be sunny in the morning. The eclipse would start around 2:15 that afternoon. By then, they were forecasting, there would be clouds — around 50% cloud cover. That doesn’t tell you how thick the clouds would be, of course, and 50% cover means 50% not cover, but I’m 68, I’d never seen a total eclipse, and I don’t know how many more chances I get. By about Friday I’d tentatively decided, based on the eclipse track and the cloud cover forecast, to drive about 3 hours to Potsdam, NY, near the Canadian border northwest of Syracuse, to watch the eclipse from there.

Then the forecast got worse. Evidently there was going to be a sharp edged band of clouds coming, and the edge was arriving earlier. Syracuse was pushing up to 60% and Potsdam was in the 40s. It was looking like Plattsburgh, off Lake Champlain at the northeastern corner of New York and right on the maximum totality line, was the place to go.

That seemed a little worrying: I figured anyone who lived in New York City or Albany who’d decided to drive to see the eclipse would be likely to choose to come up the Interstate to Plattsburgh. It’d be a mob scene. But if I came through Watertown and Potsdam I’d arrive from the northwest instead of the south, hopefully avoiding most of the traffic, and maybe I could find a spot on my side of the city to view from and not have to go into Plattsburgh at all. So that became the tentative plan.

Then on Sunday evening the forecast got worse again. Plattsburgh’s predicted cloud cover was up over 40%. But 35 miles northeast, near Enosburg, Vermont, it was still down around 20%. Northern Vermont and back in one day? Yikes. Maybe the forecast would swing back the other way. I could hope.

Kenny and I got on the road Monday before 6:00 AM. I called up directions to Plattsburgh on my phone. North on I-81 to Watertown. It had been years since I’d been in Oswego County (we lived there, 20 years ago). From there we got on Route 11 across the eastern half of the state through Gouvernour, Potsdam, Malone.

At Malone we stopped and I checked the forecast again. It wasn’t any better. I made a snap decision: Another 35 miles on top of 235? No problem. We’d head into Vermont. Looking at the map, I nearly missed but Kenny spotted Lake Carmi State Park near Enosburg. Why not? I punched that into Google Maps and we pressed on.

We continued north of Plattsburgh. If there was a lot of traffic, it wasn’t where we were. Across the northern end of Lake Champlain, 3/4 of a mile from the Canadian border. Bye, New York. Near noon we got to the turn-off for the park. There was a seasonal sign up: PARK CLOSED.

No big deal. We’d been actively watching for Plan B sites on the way in and had seen some very promising ones, the nearest being a parking lot for a rail trail a few miles back. But the road to the park was open and I decided to drive in. And it turned out the park was open, with staff there to welcome eclipse viewers. There were a few dozen cars parked near the lake and we parked ours.

By eclipse time there were, I don’t know, maybe about 100 people there. We noticed three cars out of about five parked in a row that had Minnesota plates. And they weren’t all together — or at least the people I talked to from one car had no idea who the others were. But yes, they’d driven from Minnesota. Syracuse didn’t seem so far.

Anyway, we watched over the next couple of hours as thin wispy clouds climbed higher out of the west. By eclipse time there were some in front of the sun, but nothing it couldn’t punch right through. It did make for a dramatic halo.

(That image was taken after totality. You can see how close the edge of the thicker clouds had gotten, but they were too late to spoil the show.)

The partial phase of the eclipse began. I did try to get some direct images of the eclipse, with eclipse glasses over the phone camera lens during the partial phase and without during totality, but the results were bad. So I just have some pinhole camera views.

Totality came. Besides the weather, another good thing about driving away from Syracuse was the totality duration: At my house, near the edge of the totality band, it lasted about a minute and forty seconds. At Lake Carmi, it was around three and a half minutes — and even that came and went too fast.

It was, wait for it, spectacular. The world went dark. A big black hole in the sky with the corona blazing around it. There was a bright red prominence on the bottom edge. I didn’t notice any stars — not that I looked very hard for them — but Jupiter was prominent above and left of the sun and Venus below and right. Mars and Saturn were up, but we didn’t see them — probably blocked by the denser clouds closer to the horizon. Uranus and Neptune were up too, but didn’t need the clouds’ help to not be visible. Comet Pons-Brooks was nearby but washed out and unseen.

Then the diamond ring flashed and totality was over.

We stayed a while longer. I’d kind of hoped to wait out the rush of people leaving, but there wasn’t one — or maybe there was after the post-totality partial phase ended, but we got under way before then. Back the way we came, another 270 miles and six hours. McDonald’s drivethrough on the way and on we went. One traffic bottleneck in Vermont occupied us for about ten minutes and other than that, no problem. Home, very tired, around 10 pm.

And no, the clouds apparently did not break much in Syracuse. They got glimpses but we got the better view. Worth the drive. Just don’t make me do it again.