Locals poured out of homes and buildings across Northern California to watch, with the proper eye protection of course, Monday’s celestial spectacle.
While tens of thousands from across the Pacific Coast converged on a roughly 90-mile swath of Oregon in the path of totality, many more stayed away, fearing biblical traffic, privation, coastal fog or wildfire smoke.
NSPR’s Jonathan Coke used Amtrak to avoid all that, riding the rails as far as Lincoln, Nebraska, to view the eclipse.
“As it started we could feel the air get cooler, the light get sharper, and of course we were watching the sun disappear little bit by little bit, and we were worried about clouds, there were clouds in the sky, but as the eclipse happened there were little breaks in the clouds and we got to see the corona, we got to see what I am pretty sure was Venus, but the clouds, off on the horizon as the shadow approached and as it left were just incredible, I can’t begin to describe that either,” he said.
Coke, who called it a nearly spiritual experience, is already making plans to see the next total solar eclipse in July 2019, in South America.