One of my nieces is a teacher and though her Social Media postings I found out that her school and many others are going to close Monday for “security reasons.”
According to Space.com “The maximum duration of totality for this eclipse will be 2 minutes and 40 seconds.” That is all. People are behaving like the seas will rise, mountains will fall, satellites will come crashing down to the Earth while we are covered in darkness for ages. We are gonna shut down schools for safety reasons because there will be a grand total of minutes and 40 seconds of darkness. That is not even enough amount for a decent necking and a reach for second base!
And these are schools we are talking about! Center of alleged knowledge!
And then the hysteria about the eyeballs falling off the eyes, cooked from the eclipse. In 1970 there was an annular eclipse and it was very nicely seen in Venezuela. It was a school day and we actually were at school learning our stuff. We were told to bring welder mask’s glass or welding goggles to watch the eclipse. Of course, most everybody did not have access to those items, but not to fret, the school provided pieces of dark film to each class to be shared among the students. When the time for the eclipse approached, we were herded to the huge parking lot which had been watered and was now covered in puddles. The Brothers came out on the P.A. and told us that we were to look at the eclipse though the film and into the puddles… and it worked! Hell some of us even look without the film and it was bright but we did not go blind or burned retinas. Maybe a ghost of the eclipse if we closed our eyes and that was it.
The eclipse was like any other eclipse: short and a let down after having endured pretty much the same hysteria we are seeing today was being told back then. When I got home, mom told me that the chickens we used to keep, went to their perches to sleep and then freaked out a bit when the sun came out again so fast. But other than that, cats, dogs and neighbors were pretty much the same.
You figure that 47 years later, we would have progressed a bit about eclipse B.B. but apparently not.