We're right in the path of totality, but it turns out my camera sucks so I'll just have to post my observations in text form. They handed out free eclipse glasses at the library last week, and I kept switching between looking at the eclipse through those and observing my surroundings. The latter of which was much more interesting because the view through the glasses is just a black void with an orange crescent moon shape.
For the longest time it didn't seem to be getting noticeably darker out even though the sun was more blacked out than not. The human eye is more sensitive to differences in light at the low end (which necessitates screens being on a logarithmic scale; #808080 is actually only a quarter as bright as #FFFFFF but it looks half as bright), and of course all the shadows remained sharp. Eventually it started to feel like I was looking through a pair of sunglasses or a tinted window, and my eyes were apparently adjusting to that because the glare off my neighbor's backhoe (you know, the glare from a sun that was four-fifths gone) was uncomfortably bright, as were the emergency lights on his garage.
By the time the sun was a mere sliver, it got genuinely eerie. There was still direct light, but it was dimmer than I'd ever seen it. It felt like a cross between daylight and a bright full moon. I hope someone shot some professional grade time-lapse footage and uploaded it.
When totality hit, I couldn't even see the sun through the glasses, and according to the information I was going off, this was my cue that it's safe to take them off and stare directly at it because all you're getting is the light from the corona. There was an eclipse here back in 1994, but I'm positive it wasn't actually total because I would have remembered something like this. The sky got dark like late sunset, and a star even appeared (my star chart app tells me it was Venus). The weirdest part is that the horizon looked like a sunset all the way around.
And then the whole thing happened in reverse and I only had the patience to stay out for a little while. When I went inside, though, I noticed that even though the shadows were sharp through the windows, the passive light from the sun inside felt more like a cloudy day.
