Dark Sky - the prequel

 or  We'll All Go Blind!

I’m currently out of bed and dressed and enduring a drill in my living room while a sliding door gets fixed, while waiting for the eclipse to start.  NASA’s site just hangs, won’t load so I think it’s ve-ry popular.  Should be able to watch via the ABC’s live streaming when that starts.  I hope.  Got an error message when I tried to load it earlier.

This should be good.  I feel a little sorry for besieged Exmouth, the small town up north of Perth, which now has 14,000 extra temporary inhabitants to see the one minute of totality when the world will go dark for them.  But not that much;  they’ve probably made most of their tourist revenue for the year.  I understand England’s Astronomer Royal is there.  Exmouth is the one place in the world where totality will happen.

This looks like it’ll be the best one since the solar eclipse when I was about 13 and out somewhere with friends, when we were sure we’d go blind if we looked up from the ground.

Guy doing the door said he remembers an eclipse in England where the effects were nothing like what was promised.   I didn’t think that was possible, believing that Science rules.