In case you missed it, today was the day (some of) the world went (kinda) dark.

Today was Total Eclipse 2017, which at first, when I heard that title, thought it was actually WWF promotion.

It wasn’t, though. It was the real deal. Today, the moon blotted out the sun in a diagonal slash down and across the continental 48.

When I was reminded of it this morning, having thought little about it before today, a Monday, when lots of people go back to work, I thought, “Wow- I’ve thought nothing about this.”

The next thing I thought about was when there was an eclipse a few years back, and the best view I had of that eclipse was staring into the Japanese maple that sits against the front of my sister’s house. That viewing was awesome.

The next thing I thought about was Brian Regan and his fantastic bit about an activity from his childhood: the Sun Stare. Live that bit again with me here:

I thought about today’s event, and I thought about this segment, and I thought I thought this video clip would be a hit with my friends on my timeline on Facebook. Totally.

Umm, okay.

I wanted to make the day special for someone else, and I was sending this game dude who lives across the country a note, so I drew this on the back of his envelope:

I didn’t know if he would really like it or care much about it at all, but I tried to help make today great for someone else who could actually get to enjoy today’s greatness in three or four days, and I’d like to think of this original artwork commemorating this day of two nights as a collector’s edition piece which he can hang and cherish for years to come. If he so chooses. If he sees it.

I went to work. And when the eclipse was finally set to begin in Oregon this morning, this was how I saw it:

My view of today’s historic total eclipse.

Well, that’s only partially true.

I actually did tune in on the internet to see eclipse coverage as the dueling sky objects raced across America in a real battle of light and darkness. My initial perch for viewing the astronomical event was to a page on NASA.gov- which froze and then died on me on reload about 8 minutes after I started watching it. 4.4 million folks or so used NASA’s public site to try and watch the event, and I was 4.4 million and 1, and I overloaded their servers all by myself.

I then went to the Weather Channel website, thinking they’d have excellent video and good bandwidth available there for the viewing. And guess what? Their video feed was also down.

It took a little bit, but I finally realized NASA also had a live video feed of today’s events on YouTube, and I was able to load that feed easily then keep an eye on what happened for viewers in the locales featured on the feed.

Those locales were cities or national parks where people came to gather to watch the eclipse happen above them on “the Path of Totality” (and I loved that ominous name when I first heard it). Places on the Path of Totality were subject to the “total” part of the eclipse, in which the day darkened, the moon blocked out the sun, and a dim white corona in the sky could be seen with the naked eye.

The footage online was for the most part well done. What most amazed me was seeing these locales go from broad daylight to dusk and back to daylight again in a time span of three or so minutes. What a trip.

I think a few people got a good two hundred or three hundred or one-thousand on the sun stare today. A new record.

I did get to see a few glimpses of the event as it happened. Tim had brought his awesome Sun Corona Canon in with his nuclear blast resistant filters to be able to capture moments in the eclipse’s progress. His real time photos were impressive of a glowing orb being transited by our shy satellite and a swirl of clouds.

Selections from his photos taken today ended up on his photo blog site, Off Center & Not Even, soon.

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By the way, Brian Regan is hilarious, if you’ve never given him a good listen, and he is clean. And his material is clean too. If you’ve never given him a good listen, get more here.