Total solar eclipses are magical.
The sun turns into a gleaming jewel and all of nature around you enters another dimension. The animals freak out, the temperature of the air around you drops dramatically, your shadows morph and multiply into weird shapes, it feels like midnight with an ethereal glow.
You see the atmosphere of the sun glow in all chromatic glory.
You'll never witness anything else like it.
- I saw a child start laughing uncontrollably at 99.9% and then go completely silent and literally fall over at 100%
- A grown woman began sobbing
Occurred to me that we humans are among those animals that "start acting strangely" when this event occurs. Even when we know what's happening!
For me personally, it was the first and only time in my life that I felt, in a spatial awareness sense, that I was on a rock flying through space. The immensity, scale, anciency, and inevitability of the whole system just really hit me in the face in a way that is impossible to describe.