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Totality review: holy fucking shit dude
— Keaton

Totality review: the sun isn’t supposed to do that lol
— Wyatt Carpenter

Today, 2024 April 8th, I observed a total eclipse in Beachwood, Ohio.

It’s kind of hard for my phone to take pictures of it, so just imagine a disc being obscured by another disc.

(It looked better in person.)

The moon obscures the sun just so, so that the sun is covered but its corona is visible around the moon, like an aura.

I don’t find the actual fine-tuning argument very convincing, because I have no idea what the distribution of universal constants are “ supposed to be like “. However, the fact that the Earth happens to be in an arrangement with its moon and sun in such a way that it creates an incredible astronomical event that you don’t get on other planets, and which if you read in a sci-fi book you would think “that’s technically possible but it would be really unlikely”, makes some kind of an argument for man’s significance in the universe.

I believe in god now, but like the paleolithic sun deity
— Keaton

I believe in the platonic God now, the one that is just a sphere. I mean, I just saw it!
— Wyatt Carpenter

Appendix A: Head Achey 🤕

People are always saying stuff like “don’t look at the sun when it’s partially eclipsed, you’ll go blind”. And I’m always saying “that’s probably overblown; you can glance at the sun and not go blind”. Incidentally, everyone agrees you can look at the sun during totality and it’s fine. (And, indeed, we all did, and the crowd let out a great cheer, looking up, removing their eclipse glasses when the moon completely covered the sun and it was like dusk in the middle of the day…) But I guess the joke is on me because even though I only looked at the eclipse today through the approved glasses (except during totality) the light was too strong and it gave me a headache until I went back home and rested my eyes in the dark.