Eclipse Chasers - 2017

We made it to Oregon and are currently staying with our friends Pris and Bill who we met on our first trip in Badger in 2013. We remember discussing the eclipse with them at the time and discovering that the path of totality was going right over their house. Four years later, we are here again and had a fantastic view with clear, blue skies as the show started. Mark set up the telescope with the sun filter and we all got to see the sunspots slowly disappear as the moon crossed its path.

Pris and Bill live on a butte (an elevated ridge) and we can see across to Mount Hood, 85 miles away to the north west. As the shadow of totality made its way across the flats between the buttes, we could see the sun glistening off the snow on top of the mountain which was outside of the path. The temperature dropped from 85F/29C to 65F/18C in about 15 minutes and this is what we saw

(Photos are courtesy of NASA as mine weren't as clear)

We were so lucky to have clear skies as the next few days saw smoke from the local wildfires blowing in across the ridge, blocking out the sun.

This was our third total eclipse (Plymouth in 1999 and Cairns 2012) and we are looking forward to the next one. We probably won't see the one in Argentina in 2019 as we are planning to be home by then, however, on April 8th 2024 there is one that crosses Mexico into Texas and central US before crossing into eastern Canada. Two years later on August 12th 2026, there is another one across northern Spain and the Balearics which we are definitely hoping to see :-)