Compiled by The Bedford Citizen
The Laferriere family and Don Marshall have shared their eclipse experiences.
The Laferriere Family
“One Bedford family traveled to Oregon to witness the total eclipse. “We left Portland at 7 pm the night before the eclipse, and arrived in the small town of Long Creek in eastern Oregon at around 1 am. The town had advertised eclipse parking for $25 on their web site, and it was nice to know we had an approved parking area to stay at after a long nighttime drive.
The sky was perfectly clear when we arrived, and stayed that way. After the sun rose, we had breakfast at the school (student population of 40 for K-12), and then returned to the parking area to watch as the eclipse began.
As totality approached, it got cooler and the sun’s brightness dimmed in an eerie way. The sky to the west darkened as the moon’s shadow approached. The arrival of totality left us almost speechless, it was so beautiful and awe-inspiring. We could see a few stars in the sky, but kept our eyes mostly on the amazing sight of the eclipse, with the wispy corona and even a few solar flares visible at the moon’s edge. Although totality only lasted 2 minutes, we all felt the trip was worth it, and we will have this amazing shared memory for the rest of our lives.”
Click https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwOIS-Nt_Ao to watch Amy Laferriere’s eclipse video
Don Marshall
I was fortunate to be able to witness the eclipse in Teton Park/Jackson, Wyoming with my son, Allen, and my Daughter-in-Law, Anne Bickford. Anne’s family used the eclipse as a focus for their annual family reunion and rented condo space in Teton Park. Some went up in the hills to see the eclipse, but most of us had a great view from the balcony of the condo itself.
We were especially fortunate that the adjoining balcony was occupied by another family reunion and one of the people was a NASA physicist-astronomer-eclipse chaser. We benefitted from his running commentary and he fielded many of our questions.
Our neighbor had set up a simple binocular/pin hole camera arrangement so the eclipse could be viewed on a large white board.
Someone got the idea that we could do a similar thing with a colander and sure enough we were able to image the eclipse on the floor of the balcony. Then out came some kind of flat skillet (pizza cooker someone said) with many holes in it and it worked great. Then someone got the idea of taking a small hand-made loosely braided throw rug; and when two people stretched it out a little – voila there were the images and they were superimposed on the pin wheel design from the rug! Someone else got the idea of using two table forks with the tines at right angles to one another and this worked. One of the young women present had somewhat curly hair raised well above her forehead and when she stood in the right position, her curls did the projection on the floor. Great fun!
Finally we came up with the idea of projecting the image onto the blank area of a T shirt, instead of onto the balcony floor, and this is the picture that you see here. Each of the little circles is a picture of a partial eclipse.
We experienced the apparent cooling effect that people speak about during the total eclipse which lasted a little over two minutes. I was surprised that it did not get darker. There was still enough light around the circumference of the moon that the lighting was greatly subdued but by no means dark.
The Bickford clan are already signing up for a 2024 eclipse reunion – Mazatlan, I believe –ready to repeat the adventure.
Our travel to Teton Park involved flying to Salt Lake City then renting a car and driving (5 hours more or less). The days were reasonably clear, though there was definitely a light haze at times – possibly because of all the forest fires in this part of the world. The scenery was spectacular for most of the drive which took us through Northeast Utah, a portion of Idaho, and then into Wyoming. We took a different route back through the part of Idaho with extensive recent (thousands of years ago) lava fields. We also drive to Old Faithful where we witnessed two eruptions. The first one we didn’t realize was the real thing – rather small – but the second one was beautiful. Between the two eruption events we hiked the path which took us to many of the smaller geysers and hot springs which surround Old Faithful. I for one found the hiking a little strenuous because we were at an altitude of more than 6000 feet and the oxygen is less at this altitude.
We did not see a great deal of wildlife on the trip but on the afternoon of the eclipse day itself we were treated with a visit to our condo by a large moose that was casually stripping the leaves from the decorative bushes around the condo. Quite the technique. It would grasp a few branches at one time and strip the leaves off the branches, leaving the branches (perhaps to grow another meal for a later date?).
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