As I’m sure you’re aware, on April 8th there was a total solar eclipse that was visible across a swath of North America. As it turns out, I know some folks in central Ohio who live smack dab in the middle of what was going to be the eclipse’s totality path. So, I decided to find my folding chair, snag my freebee pair of cardboard eclipse viewing glasses, and make an appearance in Small Town USA for the Big Show. I was curious to see for myself what all the fuss was about.
There was plenty of talk about this particular eclipse during the preceding weeks. A lot of it was coming from religious crackpots who were imagining the Rapture was about to go down. But some of the hype seemed unusually “official.”
For instance: The National Guard was spooled up all along the path of totality, ready to “assist as needed.” I saw this for myself, the day before the eclipse, as I drove through the little town about 5 miles from the spot where I was planning to meet up with my friends. A portion of the parking lot next to the local police station had been fenced off for the Guard. Several Army-green tents had been erected inside the perimeter, and a half dozen armored vehicles were parked in there, presumably awaiting the go code. A slew of well-armed military folks was milling about anxiously.
I wondered: What’s this all about? How is it that the National Guard can be so easily mobilized for an eclipse, but not for, say, national border protection? Eclipses are way interesting and spooky and all, but is there some sort of threat associated with them?
Anyway . . . My plan was to be in the general vicinity the evening before the eclipse, get a good night’s rest and then turn up at ground zero the following morning. My friends’ house, located just outside of town, was the agreed-upon meeting place. My friends live in a farm house, with a nice, big field adjacent on the South side, so we’d have an unobstructed view of the eclipse, right off the back deck. We were planning to hang out all day, grill a few burgers in the afternoon and so on, and then enjoy watching the day turn into night at around 3 pm, the predetermined time of the eclipse. I was looking forward to it.
Before calling it a night, though, I decided to wander around the town square for a bit. There was some action to take in.
It was an eclipse festival of sorts. There were a few vendor pop-ups and food trucks, along with a small, makeshift stage where a cute guitar-playing girl was singing Total Eclipse of the Heart, Black Hole Sun, and other appropriately themed tunes. It was a family affair for the most part – lots of parents and kids walking around and so on.
Anyhow, I grabbed a bite to eat from one of the food trucks and had myself a looksie. I stopped at a few of the vendor tents to check out the eclipse swag and regalia. I was tempted by a couple different souvenir T-shirts that were looking pretty snazzy, but I decided to pass.
I did pick up an extra pair of eclipse glasses, though, just in case my freebee pair turned out to be a dud. This new pair had an “approved by NASA” sticker. Nice!
I overheard a young boy say to his mom “This is awesome! I wish there was an eclipse every day!” He was a cute, little kid, with orange hair and a kid-sized cowboy hat. His mom yanked his arm and said, “You bite your tongue, Randy.”
I also noticed an interesting guy making the rounds with an over-the-shoulder placard that said “Repent!” on the front, and “Last Chance!” on the back. He was a pretty rough-looking sort, but the sign appeared to be professionally done up. I didn’t see him speak with anyone. His sign did all his talking for him, I guess. He just strolled along, blending in with the crowd, covering the festival in a slow, deliberate diamond pattern. Taco truck, music stage, fountain, funnel cake stand. Then back to the taco truck again.
The Main Event
The next morning, the morning of the 8th, was beautiful in Ohio. Clear, blue skies. Nice temperature. It was going to be a perfect day for checking out the eclipse. Or so I assumed.
At around 10 am, just as I was making my way to my friends’ house, They started laying down the old chemtrails. This continued until about 12:30 pm. The bluebird day was pretty much ruined. The sky became a white-grey blanket.
One of my friends said, “Aw gee. I hope we don’t get rained out.” I was just about to comment on the chemtrails, when someone else said, “Naw, that’s not rain clouds. It’s just a little hazy’s all. That’s Ohio weather for ya – You never know from hour to hour.” I kept quiet about my views on weather modification.
Even though the sky was no longer crystal clear, it was still decent enough. We all tested our eclipse glasses by looking right up at the sun. A perfect, round ball was clearly visible through our special glasses, as if all the sprayed-on gunk up in the air wasn’t even there. We reckoned that we’d be able to see the eclipse just fine, no problem.
We’ve discussed chemtrails at length in a previous podcast episode, so I won’t go into all the nitty-gritty here. But I will say that I find it highly unusual that the day of the eclipse was selected for the heaviest chemical spraying that I’ve seen so far this year. Why would this be so?
Anyhow: So it goes. Less-than-ideal viewing clarity was not about to hold us back. We gobbled down our burgers, set up our lawn chairs, and started our watch, our countdown to the Main Event.
Sure enough, a little after 2 pm, we could see the Moon starting to take a little nibble out of the Sun.
My NASA-approved eclipse glasses allowed me to see this at about 2:30 pm:
As the Moon inched its way toward totality over the next hour, I had plenty of time to reflect on how odd it is that the disk of the Moon just happens to be exactly the same size as the disk of the Sun when viewed from the Earth’s surface.
I’ve mentioned this extremely unusual fact in a previous blog titled Flat Earth? In which I pretty much poo-poo’d the popular flat Earth models – which really are conspiracy theories, I think. But at the time of that writing, I didn’t really elaborate or comment much about it.
Well, I’ll go ahead and say now, for the record: I think it’s next to impossible that the Moon might just happen to be size that it appears to be, by sheer happenstance. I mean, what are the chances that Earth’s only natural satellite would be so perfectly-sized as to make total solar eclipses possible?
Yes, I know that there are also events called annular eclipses where the size of the Moon disk doesn’t exactly match that of the Sun. But I think it’s still a bit too much of a darn-close coincidence to be blindly accepted, and I do wonder:
Is it possible that the Moon is not what we think it is?
Yes friends, as I was anticipating the imminent eclipse, this is what I was thinking about. That and I was sort of thinking about grabbing another burger.
Eclipse!
Totality occurred at about 3:14 pm. Here’s what it looked like just before the Sun was completely obscured:
And here’s what it looked like, on the brink of the full eclipse, a few seconds before totality, at 3:14 pm:
And then: Disco!
Here’s a money shot of the total eclipse on April 8th, 2024, vantage point: central Ohio, USA:
The total eclipse was viewable like this for about 4 minutes, give or take.
I must say: It was breathtaking.
A really remarkable thing to witness. I was blown away, as were all my friends. We were a gang of slack jaws, for sure.
No special glasses were needed during the totality. We all just eyeballed it directly.
Other than the aforementioned perfect disk size match-up between the Moon and Sun, here are some of my observations from viewing the total eclipse:
- There was a noticeable red spot along the eclipse ring, at about the 7 o’clock position. It was there for the duration of totality. A prominent glob of Sun plasma, perhaps?
- My immediate surroundings gave the impression of an eerie pseudo-nighttime scene. It was dark and quiet, but in a different sort of way from real nighttime. For one thing, there was the glow of light around the entire horizon – South, North, East, and West.
- I saw a few bats flapping around. The eclipse had fooled them briefly. Fun!
Then, just as expected, the Big Show came to an end. A sudden burst of light came forth as the Moon continued along its path, and the Sun began to regain control of the daytime sky.
Almost everyone around me began closing up shop. My friends had seen the Big Show, and now it was over. It was time to return to business as usual.
But a few of us put our eclipse glasses back on and continued watching.
And that’s when things got weird.
Exit Stage Left
A total solar eclipse is expected to go something like this:
Capturing individual eclipse stages over time – over, say, 2 hours – and sequencing them from left to right, should produce an image like this.
We would expect to see the Moon progressively obscuring the Sun until totality is reached, and then, after totality, we would expect to see the Moon progressively departing the scene. The thing to notice is that all this occurs along a straight line.
Meaning: From a stationary vantage point, the Moon should appear to travel in a consistent, predictable, linear path as it passes over the Sun.
And indeed, as expected, the beginning stages, before totality, followed this script perfectly on April 8th, as documented above. In fact, if we superimpose a clock dial on the 2:30 pm image from above, we get this:
I’m not placing the clock dial in this image (and some of the ones that follow) as an indicator of time. I’m overlaying the clock dial so we can have a reference for positions and angles.
From this image we can predict that the Moon is moving in the direction of the blue arrow, and we can guess that the final burst of sunlight before totality should occur at roughly the 10:30 position on the clock dial.
In fact, the Moon did exactly that, as we can see below with the clock dial superimposed on the 3:14 pm image from above:
Another prediction would be that after totality, the Moon, traveling on its merry way along the path of the straight, blue arrow, would give us our returning glimpse of a sunlight burst at the 4:30 position on the clock dial.
But this is not what occurred!
After approximately 4 minutes of totality, the Sun began to emerge here:
As you’ll see, this is not the 4:30 clock dial position.
Let’s superimpose the clock dial again:
Strangely, the returning sunburst occurred at something closer to 7:00 on the clock dial.
And as we can see in the following shots, the Moon appeared to continue exiting along this new direction as the eclipse event came to an end:
. . .
Piecing all this together, here’s the observed path of the Moon on April 8th:
I’d say this is beyond bizarre. Why / How did the path of the Moon abruptly change by 66 degrees during the 4 minutes of the eclipse?
I’ll admit that my angular approximation might be a bit off. (Dare I speculate that the turn angle was actually 66.6 degrees?!) – but there’s no doubt that there was a significant Moon path change. It was easily observable on the day, by anyone who bothered to watch. If you don’t want to take my word for it, there are plenty of amateur photos and videos on the good old interweb. For the time being, anyway. Maybe they’ll get scrubbed. Here’s one such example video.
If anyone can explain this to me, I invite you to please submit a comment in the TPD forum.
Phil’s Two Cents
This eclipse business is unusual for several reasons:
- If the Moon can change directions so abruptly, it cannot be the massive orbital object that’s been described to us in schoolbooks. So what is the Moon?
- The emerging sunburst after the eclipse (marking the Moon’s new path / direction) just happened to be at the same location as the red spot / plasma glob mentioned above that could be seen during totality. What’s that about?
- Let’s not forget that the lead up to this particular eclipse had the National Guard and a good part of the religious community all tied up in knots. Why? Was there another layer to this eclipse event that is just outside our general awareness?
- Why is no one shouting about how the Moon juked hard-right during the eclipse? Even on the day, when I was flipping out about it amongst my friends, all I got were some unconcerned shoulder shrugs.
- And mainly: What the F&$K?
Bottom line: It would appear that our map of reality is not accurate.
It’s probably not even close.
– “Phil”
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