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Researching this event has me discovering that Texas is pretty horrible when it comes to public lands. There's basically nothing in the totality path for the entire state.. a few small state parks and and it's a near guarantee those are going to be jam packed with day trippers. Well, everything along the route is going to be jam packed. But I feel like Texas is going to be a step above due to proximity to some enormous cities. That happened in 2017 so it's gonna happen again in 2024. I'm thinking the situation will force me into Arkansas where there's at least some national forest. All dense forest with limited clearings but unfortunately the further north you go the worse the weather trends get so that might be my sweet spot. Any locals in here that got feedback? Wish I'd found this thread sooner because I've been trying to figure out a plan since spring.
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Nov 2, 2023 16:59
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Judgy Fucker posted:If you're looking to be in the NE Texas/SW Arkansas area, I might suggest Beaver's Bend State Park in SE Oklahoma. Thanks, I had actually just scrolled over that the other day and then forgot to dig into it deeper. How's the hiking/roads back in there? I prefer to be away from folks as much as possible so was considering some of the side roads off the NE side of the lake. The sun will pretty much be at its highest point in the sky during the eclipse in that area so my ability to get an epic earth+sun photo are pretty slim but I'll try anyways. Maybe hike into one of the south facing coves and see if I can manage something.
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Nov 2, 2023 18:09
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I saw a story a couple days ago that I can't find now, reservations for the state parks in Texas open this week for eclipse weekend (5 months in advance, so that would have been today if you want to get in a day early). Which doesn't really bother me, I had no intention to reserve a camp site. But what did stick out to me is that all the state parks will be closed to entry unless you have a reservation. Seems odd, I kind of get it, but parks are usually pretty open to day use too.
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Nov 8, 2023 02:29
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HenryJLittlefinger posted:If you get on it right this minute, White Rock Recreation Area in the Ozark National Forest might still have spots. They opened reservations on Saturday. The closest spots within the path of totality to that campground are about 20 miles to the east on Forest Service roads along Arkansas Hwy 23, in the Cass to Turner Bend area. Checked it out on recreation.gov, and they have the 7th-10th blocked out with "closure: administration". So I guess they have other designs for that area. Hopefully they don't start closing down roads too as my current plan is to find a turnout and chill out for a couple days. quote:I've got family who work for the Forest Service, and they are preparing for basically a complete shutdown of roads and public land through that part of Arkansas. Their projection is over a million people and they anticipate the roads to be gridlocked. This is the biggest event for public lands around there in decades, maybe ever. It'll bring more people into Arkansas in a few days time than Hurricane Katrina did. I did the 2017 eclipse in Oregon, and it was bad, but it wasn't that bad. Granted the number of dense cities close to the Ozarks is much greater than eastern Oregon, but the advantage in this case is that the biggest cities in the area are also in the totality path. I appreciate the forest service putting in effort to prepare but the simple problem is no one can predict how many are going to show up, this type of event doesn't happen often enough. They definitely need to prepare for the worst but I suspect things will be mostly fine. The annular last month had the same issue, they planned the best they could and a lot of people did show up but it wasn't 36 hours of gridlock. I had empty roads that afternoon as I headed towards my next campsite. Every ranger had boxes of unused viewing glasses. Fun snapshot from 2017: this is the Madras region in Oregon about 15 minutes after totality: 
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Nov 14, 2023 00:15
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Based on being near a hotspot in 2017 (the mountains near Bend, OR) the majority of spectators will have the same idea. Hop in the car extremely early, get to a spot, and 2 seconds after totality ends jump in the car and try to beat the rush home. The roads around Bend were dark red on google maps for several hours. If you can overnight or make a day of it to let traffic die down it might actually be an enjoyable experience. Unfortunately given the path of this eclipse there is not a lot of public land to spread out into. The annular eclipse last fall had the same doom-and-gloom warnings but traffic never really materialized. It passed over vast swaths of BLM territory so it was relatively easy to park on a bare patch somewhere and camp for a couple nights. Annulars aren't as spectacular either and that almost certainly played into suppressing traffic. I feel like the panic from regional authorities is just something they have to do, these events happen so rarely it's hard to predict what's going to happen. So they assume the worst.
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Feb 9, 2024 20:13
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I personally am excited for the Iceland eclipse in 2026 and the Alaska one in 2033. Both are big travel situations (the Alaska one in particular is rough) but they're also great places to just visit. The 2017 repeat in 2045 I might be able to watch from a wheelchair.
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Feb 9, 2024 23:08
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Probably, the skies are more likely to be clear too. But Iceland's westfjords are the closest land to the greatest eclipse, which provides the longest totality. Which is only a 30 second difference but there's still value in that. I think 2.5 years out is too early to make actual reservations but it's definitely worth starting to plan things out.
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Mar 2, 2024 16:03
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I have a film filter from 2017 that is still fine. Yeah it's fragile but it's not like you can play frisbee with a glass filter either, keep it in a case and it'll last forever. Amazon still has sheets of A4 baader film in stock so with some construction paper you can certainly make your own. But we're definitely getting into the "more difficult to buy necessary gear" phase as people become more aware of the gear requirements.
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Mar 4, 2024 19:56
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I would counter that the filter is still a good idea so you can do prep work before totality, making sure things are aimed properly and everything is tracking well. Also if you're in a public space I guarantee someone will ask if they can take a look.
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Mar 4, 2024 20:08
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Forecasts don't even start to get close to reality until a week out anyways. So on Monday start obsessively checking windy
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Mar 27, 2024 21:56
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I like how there's a line of clouds/storms that almost perfectly follows the eclipse path through the midwest. I'm no meteorologist but my anecdotal experience is that forecasts a week out lean pessimistic. That doesn't mean Texas will have clear skies next Monday but I'd put my money towards it not being as bad as it looks now.
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Mar 31, 2024 13:29
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And to think a year and half ago I avoided looking at locations in new england because the weather is so notoriously gloomy this time of year.
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Apr 1, 2024 21:44
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It's been shown to be very hard to predict numbers for eclipses, they happen so rarely that no one really has good data on them. So most agencies plan for the worst and at least for the two since 2017 attendance has been less than forecast. Oregon roads did fill up post-eclipse but that's because there was only a couple two lane roads available for use, but the state got well under the million they expected. Wyoming saw less than 200k people show up. Obviously the closer to a major population center the worse it's going to get, southern Illinois had ~300k show up in 2017. South Carolina saw many less than predicted, but they also had clouds move in so it probably pushed people away. So I guess the lesson is plan for the worst but don't be surprised if things are just fine.
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Apr 2, 2024 15:34
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Remoteness definitely helps, but it's hard to do that east of the Mississippi. For 2017 there was probably 10 people on the little cliff I picked in Oregon. We also saw no traffic either because I rigged it so we'd spend all day in the same spot and when we did hit the road, were driving against the main flow. So find the smallest shittiest dirt road your vehicle can handle on any USFS territory you got available and hope it's not too muddy.
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Apr 2, 2024 19:47
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Look for any public lands in the area.. parks, government land, whatever. Some people will even hang out at graveyards, which is kinda creepy but technically valid I suppose. But it's almost a certainty that local management will know it's a target and have something organized. Either a ticketing system or they'll have closed it off (many state partks in Texas did both). Even a highway rest stop or wayside will work if you're really scrounging. A walmart parking lot will be fine. If you're out in cornfield territory just slide into a field access turnout, you probably won't get bothered. In short spend time on google maps zooming on satellite mode to come up with options and be ready to adapt. Unless they got flashing lights on the roof or a shotgun, once you set up you can ignore anyone yelling at you.  edit - the public lands overlay on caltopo is a good way to scan around for places you can probably squat in without guilt. But I don't see anything popping up around Findlay so you might have to stick to google maps xzzy fucked around with this message at 16:46 on Apr 4, 2024 |
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Apr 4, 2024 16:43
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TraderStav posted:Thanks! That's in line where I was thinking but with some more granular and specific examples that will be helpful. Leaving early enough to get bounced out of a few locations (closed, unavailable, etc.) will get that safety margin to reduce the stress of it all. Hence my reason to pack a bunch of food, water, and entertainment for the family so we can brave it if we strike gold early. I don't know the area at all, but spots I would look at are Ouabache State Park, Delphos Gilmour Reservoir, Robert K Antibus Trail, Winona Lake, Van Buren State Park, Arealand Recreational Area, and National Lime and Stone Park. Basically just scroll around on google map satellite and anything that is green and looks like it has a parking area is a candidate.
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Apr 4, 2024 16:54
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Luneshot posted:How much do public spaces fill in the hours before the eclipse? Do people tend to show up in the early hours of the morning? There’s a small city park near us that we were going to walk to, but we may just stay in our backyard if it’s going to be hard to find standing room. It could be a shoulder to shoulder madhouse or it could be totally chill. These events happen so rarely it's impossible to predict attendance with any reliability. If your home is in the path of totality I'd stay there. Maybe a neighborhood park if you want to experience it with your neighbors. If you have to travel, my general feeling is the easier the spot is to google as a "best spot" the more people are gonna show up there.
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Apr 4, 2024 20:17
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DrBouvenstein posted:I'm trying not to read to much into an earthquake happening three days before an eclipse, a day after a massive snow storm...but if no I see locusts or some first born getting slaughtered this weekend, imma start to get nervous. Maybe get some xanax then because two major cicada blooms are happening in the midwest in May.. estimates are up hundreds of thousands per acre. These two broods haven't synced like this since 1803. Gonna be one noisy insect orgy in Illinois.
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Apr 5, 2024 16:26
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bawfuls posted:The maximum duration that’s theoretically possible right now with the moon’s distance from the earth is something around 7 minutes. But the longest in our lifetimes was 6:45ish in China and the Pacific back in 2009. I don’t believe there are any longer than that this century. Interestingly, we're near the tail end of the golden age of eclipses on Earth. On a timescale of hundreds of millions of years, but still, it's drawing to a close. The moon is slowly moving further away and decreasing it's angular size so eventually (like, hundreds of millions of years) there will be no more total eclipses. As we get to that point annulars will be an ever increasing percentage of eclipses. This also means (I think, my science details may be fuzzy) the total eclipses we do get will be shorter and shorter.
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Apr 8, 2024 22:15
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BBC bravely implying Texas isn't part of the US. Also Canada and Mexico do not exist. 
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Apr 9, 2024 00:26
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The 2027 and 2028 ones are relatively long duration too, over 5 minutes. I think I'm most jazzed for 2026 in Iceland, weather will almost certainly suck but it's fuckin Iceland. Clouds or no clouds you win. Then once you get into the 2030's, assuming we're not all fighting for scraps in a barren wasteland, 2033 and 2037 are my picks. Getting to Nome in March might be an expensive challenge but getting on top of a mountain/hill and looking down to look for shadowbands on a layer of snow sounds interesting.
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Apr 9, 2024 14:59
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Those are some fine prominences and beads. I love how every eclipse has its very own corona and solar flare combo. It is insanely easy to spot shots of the 2017 eclipse from the three pointed corona for example. The prominences of 2024 to me are the most identifiable trait. And in case it hasn't been mentioned in here yet, those are about 3 earths long.
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Apr 9, 2024 18:24
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Star Man posted:And no one ever fuckin cares. I could strap someone to a stretcher and staple their eyelids open and they will spontaneously combust if it means not looking up at a crescent moon. If it help you feel better I got my elementary school to care for a partial eclipse in the 80's, I was the resident space nerd and read about it in my copy of Odyssey. End result the entire school was out in the playground with various homemade solar viewing apparatus.
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Apr 10, 2024 00:26
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Also consider getting into lunar eclipses. They aren't anywhere near as spectacular as solar ones but they happen much more often and are easier to photograph. 2024 doesn't have any notable ones but 2025 has two, one covering the western hemisphere in March and one for the eastern in September. 2026 has two as well but one is over the pacific.
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Apr 10, 2024 05:00
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I wouldn't call myself a super emotional type, I'm raised in the bad old ways where you crush feelings into a compactor and bury it deep somewhere, but I do get a little bit of a swell during maximum eclipse. There's just something about all the randomness in the universe coordinating such a precise alignment that us dumb humans can predict it down to a fraction of a second. And then my dumb rear end takes that information and picks a spot to be to witness a visual that will never again. Even if a total eclipse does pass over the same spot twice it won't be the same, duration is different, prominences are different, the beads are different and the corona is different. It's a thing that can only happen exactly once in all the history of the universe. Once per reality events like that technically happen all the time but a solar eclipse is more monumental than most.
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Apr 10, 2024 19:19
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I guess the fix for global warming is a mr. burns sun shield that blocks 30% of sunlight. This will have no side effects at all.
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Apr 11, 2024 19:36
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GunnerJ posted:So like, between Spain and Iceland, which will have the longer totality in 2 years? Iceland as the Snaefellsnes peninsula and Westfjords will be the closet land to maximum eclipse. But we're only talking 10-20 seconds difference. Maximum along the center line is like 2:20 and most places in Iceland are about 2:10 and Spain is about 1:45. And Iceland has a 60% chance of being overcast.
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Apr 12, 2024 23:29
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