For the 2017 total solar eclipse, I travelled to Madras, OR with my wife, son, parents and sister.

About 30 miles west of Madras, OR is Mt. Jefferson. I hoped that I could watch the mountain to see the umbra of the moon pass over it. At our location, according to a app I had used, totality was to start at 10:19:35. At about 10:17, I started watching the mountain. I didnt know how sharp the edge of the umbra would be. We could not see the edge of the umbra, but we could see the mountain gradually go dark over the course of maybe 10 seconds, which was still a dramatic sight.

I then turned my attemtion back to the sun and moon for the final minute or so before totality. I kept glancing back and forth between the sun and the white tarp we had laid out to attempt to see shadow snakes. At around 20 seconds before totality, I began to see the shadow snakes. Though they were very faint, they were unmistakeable. I attempted to capture a video of them with my phone. In the first few seconds of the video, you can just make out the shadows. They seemed to last no more that 15 seconds. I observed similar shadow snakes just after totality.

I was surprised at how bright the corona was during totality. It was a bright white ring surronding the dark circle of the moon. There were three long white tails, presumably solar flares. Two were coming ou the top of the sun and the other out of the bottom. They were each around one and a half to two solar diameters long.

I looked around and saw the sunset on every horizon. I noticed that Mt. Jefferson was visible again.

You’ll find this post in your _posts directory. Go ahead and edit it and re-build the site to see your changes. You can rebuild the site in many different ways, but the most common way is to run jekyll serve, which launches a web server and auto-regenerates your site when a file is updated.

To add new posts, simply add a file in the _posts directory that follows the convention YYYY-MM-DD-name-of-post.ext and includes the necessary front matter. Take a look at the source for this post to get an idea about how it works.

Jekyll also offers powerful support for code snippets:

def print_hi(name)
  puts "Hi, #{name}"
end
print_hi('Tom')
#=> prints 'Hi, Tom' to STDOUT.

Check out the Jekyll docs for more info on how to get the most out of Jekyll. File all bugs/feature requests at Jekyll’s GitHub repo. If you have questions, you can ask them on Jekyll Talk.