During partial coverings the ambient light is reduced which makes shadows sharper and clearer.

Also the reduced light means your eyes have less light to discriminate color with, resulting in ordinarily bright colors being muted or gray-ish.

Yeah, the severe color change was an interesting experience. I didn't bother trying to image it, as the fakey fakeness of the enhancing software would have "corrected" it.

Not only that, but the light source that's creating the shadow gets smaller (in terms of arc length), so the shadow becomes more crisp.

When it's a crescent shape, it's also more crisp in one direction. So if you hold up a square and make a shadow on the ground, two sides are sharp, two sides are blurry. Or if you look at your own shadow, it's a mix of sharp and blurry edges, which looks unusual.

Hi neighbor! Even with the clouds covering at the critical moment, the experience was just so one of those things you must experience yourself as you'll never get a sense of it from just someone else describing it to you. I had been reading and watching content from people that had previously experience eclipses, and even though what they describe happening happened, it's just totally different in person. I used to say this about seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time after seen pictures/video of it, but the eclipse was at least 10x that experience.

I'm thankful for the clouds clearing enough for the experience, but I really felt that the totally clear skies within minutes of totality ending was really just a slap in the face from the universe!

I live north of Austin and the hour before totality we had a fair amount of clouds with the sun just peaking through, then just minutes before we reached 100% the low clouds just seemingly evaporated, temperatures dropped sharply, and every bird and frog around started singing. All the automatic lights had turned on by that time. Then totality hit and seeing the 'black hole sun' with a white ring around it was just awe inspiring. You don't know exactly how to interpret the sky, because it's kind of like pre-dawn in every direction. Sky glow is coming from every direction, and yet it's dark where you are. Finally when the sun comes back it rapidly brightens. Looking off to the north east I could see the darkness of the shadow that had been over us.

> I used to say this about seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time after seen pictures/video of it, but the eclipse was at least 10x that experience.

I said the same thing about seeing Tunnel View in Yosemite for the first time. It's the closest thing that I can say that describes the experience and the eclipse eclipses (heh) that.