Eclipse in Indiana!!

Just a brief blog post about viewing the 2024 total solar eclipse in Indiana today….

For the 2017 total eclipse, friends of mine had traveled down to South Carolina for the experience of totality. I wrote about the partial eclipse I saw then, back in Virginia. So, when I heard that the 2024 total eclipse would pass through Indiana, where some of my wife’s family lives, I made plans to make the trip out to view the eclipse and while visiting family.

It was worth it.

If you have never seen a total eclipse yourself, and you have the opportunity, you should experience it. Thankfully, the clouds in Evansville, Indiana, began to disappear about 15 minutes before totality. So, we got a fantastic view of the sun and moon in the sky. Just about five minutes before totality, the sky started to grow darker and darker, and the air temperature got cooler.

The moment of totality was a completely surreal experience. It was a lot to take in for the next 3 or 4 minutes. The most amazing sight was the corona around the eclipsed sun. The above photograph does not do the event justice. But you can get a just little sense of the moment.

I could make out the planets Jupiter and Venus (Venus is about at the “4:30” mark, from a clock perspective, down from the son/moon).  It was too difficult to see any stars, as there was just enough high cloud cover to obscure any sighting other than the planets in our solar system.

But it was really eery. The birds kept singing, but some of the nighttime crickets started to wake up and chirp. Along the horizon towards the southeast, at the bottom of the photo, it looked like sunset, even though it was only 2pm!

Sorry to all of the crazy “bible prophecy” folks like Jim Staley, the most visible advocate of the Hebrew Roots Movement, ……. but nothing out of the ordinary happened……Jim Staley has got a bit too much free time on his hands. In the video, Staley got the historical number of eclipses passing through the United States completely wrong. But I doubt if Staley would bother with issuing a correction.

Eclipses were connected to past events in the Bible, but to try to connect today’s astronomically predictable eclipses, which happen somewhere on planet earth about once every 18 months, with biblical prophecy is just foolish thinking. Instead, the viewing of eclipses today are best opportunities to give thanks to the God of the Universe, the Creator of all things, who gives us the privilege of viewing fairly rare, but altogether not unusual events, as a display of his handiwork in nature.

In my previous post on eclipses, I noted that we live at a unique time in the history of the universe where can even view such solar eclipses. That, in and of itself, is of such low probability that the existence of such viewable eclipses further strengthens the argument for a Creator. My motto for such arguments for God is that a bird in the hand is better than two birds in a bush. Strangely though, some Christians opt for those two birds in a bush. In the meantime, I will stick with my bird in the hand!

Unfortunately, in North America, the next total solar eclipse will not happen until 2044, and that will only be visible in the U.S. in North and South Dakota and Montana. Another one will travel from California to Florida in 2045, but it still will not have as great as impact as today’s eclipse in the U.S.