Third Image:

I was lucky enough to witness the 2017 eclipse right down the street from my house at Edgar Road School here in Webster Groves, MO, where my kids were attending. That was an amazing experience, if only for 30 seconds of totality. This time around, I knew I would be travelling, albeit not too far, about 2 hours south of St. Louis. Eclipses are funny in that the sun has to be completely blocked in order to get the true experience of totality. Most of St. Louis was getting around 99+ percent coverage and many of my friends and neighbors were thinking they would essentially get the same experience as 2017. I had to break it to them that 1% of the Sun's light is as bright as 10,000 full moons .

Anyway, I knew the weather on the 8th was going to be a crap shoot in the Midwest in April. On Friday April 5th, I decided the skies were likely to be partially clear and I was going. My 14 year old daughter and I travelled to southern Missouri to stay at a college buddy's hunting cabin near Marble Hill, Missouri. I knew traffic was going to be bad on the 8th, so we headed down on the 7th, her birthday. On the 8th, we got up in the morning and made final adjustments to the scopes and noticed the clouds were breaking early and we would be able to enjoy totality. When it hit, it was as expected, amazing!! I thought I remembered the 2017 eclipse being darker than this one, not sure if it really was the case. The only downside was there were some thin high level clouds that made my images soft. The worst part of the trip was the ride home which took us 4.5 hours, normally a 2 hour drive . The highway heading north looked like everyone was fleeing a hurricane . We saw license plates from all over the country.

It retrospect, it was great to be able to share this experience with my daughter. I guess we are now officially eclipse chasers, being that we've been to two