Our eyes are extremely good at adapting to changing light levels, due to the clever combination of rapid small-scale changes (iris) and slower but wide range changes (sensitivity). Astronomical magnitudes are a factor of roughly 2.5 each step (roughly the 5th root of 100) which the ancients considered the smallest reliable change in brightness to be detected between two objects. If the change is slow, as with an eclipse, it’s remarkable how big it has to be before it’s noticed. I missed this one due to location, but when I was at school we had one at a convenient time of day for our physics teacher to arrange for everybody interested to get together, make observations and use a telescope.
In those days astronomy was for nerds - the moon landing was several years off - and about ten of us turned out from a school of over 600.
we left Reno on sunday morning and drove ~7 hours or so to John Day, Oregon, then hiked about 5 miles up to the top of Dixie Butte, a bald-topped peak at 7,200’. we spent the night in sleeping bags under the stars (OMG the stars!), then the next morning by the time the eclipse started we probably had a couple hundred new friends. it was an incredible place to view it from… i’ve see partial eclipses, which are really cool, but this was a whole other level. i was honestly moved to tears… i can see how ancient cultures would lose their minds over it. the temperature dropped quite a lot, and at totality it got about as dark as a night with a full-moon’s light. we even got to see the moon’s shadow approaching across the land below, and then got to see it move on past us after totality. i’ll never forget it.
here’s one panoramic shot i took shortly before totality, showing all the people standing along the ridge top. there were more people down the other side on the right, behind the ranger lookout station.
All the traffic lights and neon window signs in town seemed to be getting brighter and brighter. Of course actually it was that the sun was getting dimmer.
I think just before totality the street lights came on. During totality all the automatic lights in downtown Madras were blazing, all the gas stations, drive throughs, whatever.
Except that the sky was still a little blue, and the clouds on the horizon were backlit red, it was basically nighttime in the middle of the day. It was like the world was a theater and somebody turned the houselights off.
Not a great picture, by any means, but considering that this was a cell phone with a cheap 8x zoom lens precariously balanced on top of a car for (some) stability, it came out rather well:
Sadly, I couldn’t figure out a good way to get the camera properly pointed at the sun before/after totality while juggling a makeshift filter without risking my own eyesight, since I’d need to be looking roughly in the same direction as the camera to see where it was pointed on its screen. Now that it’s over I realize I might have been able to use the lower-res selfie mode, but hindsight is 20/20 and thankfully not sun-blinded.
(I fully expected this viewing to be anticlimactic… through most of the first half of the eclipse there were clouds obscuring most of the action with just a few breaks. Then the sky suddenly cleared up just a few minutes before totality, and stayed mostly clear through the rest. Score!)
The Eye of Sauron is brought to you by Mr. kidd’s intern from their job site within Ft. Campbell, the one place in North America that had the total-est totality:
Sadly, still not a very good picture, and no one thought to video the 360 sunset. 
Albany, OR. This is close to what it looked like for me; the iPhone 7 (1x) bloom of the corona swamped the black disk of the moon, and I manually added that back in. I was surprised at how bright and clearly visible the corona was, with more radial structure than is visible in this photo.
wow, great shot! i didn’t even bother trying to get a photo with my phone. now i wish i would have. : \