by Victor Davis

Unsettled weather along the path of totality upended the viewing plans of many umbraphiles on the week leading up to April 8^th’s total solar eclipse. So it was with our intrepid band of me, my wife Susanna, and two other couples who early on had made plans to travel to the Historic Leakey Inn close to the Mexican border in Leakey, Texas. When the weather forecast for our chosen site became reliably dismal, we instead packed up our car and drove from NJ to stay with our friends (one of the couples mentioned above) at their home in Stowe, Vermont.  There we scoped out a great viewing site at the top of their road. We experienced 2 minutes 50 seconds of totality. Several prominences that we’d seen in the H-alpha scope prior to totality shone without filtration with brilliant red fluorescence at second contact.  It was glorious. We chose not to photograph the eclipse except for a few “souvenir” cellphone shots a few folks took through eyepieces of my Questar and the two-tiered gizmo shown above. I’ll be looking for images captured by others that highlight the streaming corona and the brilliantly fluorescent prominences that excited us visually. The drive back to NYC on Tuesday took about ten hours, and  memories of “Oh my God!” moments will always stay with us.