8-21-17

From a friend's front yard in Keizer, Oregon (a suburb of Salem). His house lay right in the path of totality, and he let us park our trailer on his lawn. I didn't realize the corona would overexpose; if I ever get a chance to try another eclipse photo, I'll stop down the exposure a couple of notches. Anyway, the sight is definitely worth traveling to see. You can understand why the spectacle was a total(!) freakout for people who didn't know what was going on. At the point of totality, when the (dark) lunar disk is outlined by the corona, it looks as though there's a black hole in the sky where the sun's supposed to be. The insert shows a streetlight across from the house that clicked on during totality. We also saw Venus and Jupiter, but got no pix. There's also a "ring of twilight" all around, from the sky in the distance beyond the Moon's shadow.

Procyon lotor. This guy suddenly ran out from between the houses after the eclipse and climbed a tree in the front yard. Raccoons _never_ do things like that--i.e., run out in daylight, particularly with a bunch of people standing around--and we figure he got confused by the eclipse. (Hopefully he wasn't rabid, but we kept our distance--this is a telephoto pic.) I'd've gotten an even better pic, which showed his front paws, except that the battery died when I pushed the button! These animals almost have fingers, and I think I know what the next tool-using species will be if _Homo sap_ goes extinct... ;)

On the North Santiam River in Oregon, a tributary of the Willamette draining from the Cascades. The dam was built in the early 1950s, before blocking salmon streams was an issue! It backs up Detroit Lake. It _does_ generate hydropower; the inset photo looks down at the front of the dam where the penstocks emerge on their way to the powerhouse. Why "Detroit?" you ask. The original settlers were mostly from Michigan, and they named their settlement after _that_ Detroit. Ironically, the original site is under the reservoir; the modern village was relocated out of the path of the lake.