Western Wyoming:
10:55 a.m. MDT - The sun's disc is perhaps 1/3 occluded, the "eclipse glasses" work fine. However, my attempt at a homemade pinhole camera is a flop. We have mostly clear skies and lovely shirtsleeve weather today, actually we have that most summer days.
11:05 a.m. MDT - According to a Vox-provided utility, totality is supposed to occur here at 11:35 a.m. Hat tip to Instapundit for the link. As the amount of sunlight begins to wane, the day while still fully light takes on the autumnal cast that occurs naturally every year as the sun's arc sinks toward the southern sky and its rays strike us less vertically and more obliquely.
11:10 a.m. MDT - I'm also tracking a NASA website which has a live feed of the eclipse from Salem, Oregon. You might check it out.
11:15 a.m. MDT - We are hosting friends and relatives from CA who are here for the solar event of their lives. In the WY Rockies, we enjoy snarking that we have only two seasons - winter and company. Living near two national parks can cause that. The eclipse makes it temporarily acute as opposed to chronic.
11:44 a.m. MDT - The eclipse arrived right on schedule and we didn't quite achieve totality where we live. We did briefly get quite close, it got very gloomy and cold, yes cold in August. Most of my company and the other DrC went north forty miles to experience the brief total darkness. The gloom we saw didn't last long but was very out-of-the-ordinary nevertheless.
11:50 a.m. MDT - One of my guests and I watched the near-totality from our driveway. As it was happening Mike looked down at the concrete pad outside the garage and pointed at strange narrow waves of additional darkness passing across the light gray concrete. Neither of us had any explanation for the phenomenon. He also noticed as we approached near-totality the birds got very quiet.
6:20 p.m. MDT - Our delegation who drove north to Moose to see totality were treated to a naked eye view of the corona, which it never got dark enough for us who stayed behind to see. On the other hand, we saw "ghost shadows" which is the semi-official name of the "strange narrow waves of additional darkness" mentioned above, and they did not see these. They heard NASA cannot explain the cause of "ghost shadows." We hear the traffic was as bad as it looked on the WyDOT traffic cam.
