Re: What Made My Day Today? :-)

It was great :)
5 full minutes of total eclipse. My first time in my life. It had to come right above me for me to see it, as I wasn't that crazy about it to travel.
I was at the parking lot of a grocery store when it began to become really dim. Then together with a bunch of people we waited till it comes. Others had paper glasses for it but I could not find my very dark sunglasses, so I had to just wait till it becomes total, then it lasted at least 5 minutes!
Two Mexican little shitters were watching it and going this way and that way with their paper glasses and getting excited and stuff like, "Del sol este mucho pequito!" They were just before school age, so they weren't at that time of the day in school. I bet those in schools had all sorts of programs arranged for them to observe it.
There were two exceptional features about this occasion that I noticed. The perceived diameter of the Moon was larger than that of the Sun, so duration of total eclipse was pretty long and almost the maximum that it can get, taking the moods of everything around right into 10 pm at night, causing store signs and street lights automatically come up. Another thing was the size of the amazing corona despite the fact that part of it also was covered by Moon (chromosphere was totally missing of course - you'd see that in annular eclipses). It was much larger than the pictures of solar eclipse one finds in books. Sun is near its maximum and therefore those areas around it have vastly expanded. I tried to see if I could catch any movements, I saw a few slow movements but it was by all probability the very thin cloud of various thicknesses drawing a random movement inside the corona.
Also it happened when Sun was almost vertically up (1:40 pm DST local time - 12:40 pm regular time), so much less atmosphere was blocking the way.
The intensity of light in the corona was like you were looking at the regular Moon (no dark glasses needed). But as soon as an intensely bright dot appeared at a spot on the diameter of the black Moon, I had to stop seeing the event and walked inside the grocery store. If I had my very dark sunglasses, I would watch much more before and after the total phase.
Also I forgot all about it that I had placed my powerful binocular in the gloves compartment of the car to use it for this occasion :) The scene had taken my attention (and breath) totally away. So I missed using it. People were filming and photographing it, etc. But those stuff would take my attention away.
It was still great.