Back in Chicago, John and I went to see Hidden Figures last week at Millennium Park. On the way back I caught this lovely glimpse of our very own Picasso. A couple of notes about why I’m starting this post with this particular image: first, Hidden Figures brings up so much interest in NASA and space, which we also got caught up in with the eclipse last week. Second, I wanted to wish our Picasso a happy 50th birthday! And after seeing so many beautiful Picasso paintings at the Guggenheim, coming across this angle of the sculpture at night was a real treat.
Quick lovely shots from the UChicago campus taken recently… I see this tree in the mornings on my way to my office – it’s oddly growing in this cross section way – no foliage on the east side.
Sculpture of Charles Linnaeus on the Midway. I like to think that the visitor in front of it is contemplating the wonder of his classification systems.
Ok, so fast forward to last weekend. We drove to Urbana, IL, to spend the night before the eclipse. The house we stayed in was pretty amazing! Here are a few interiors.
The next morning we drove 3 hours to Carbondale, IL, in the south of the state. I didn’t take many pics at the event, there was so much going on. What we experienced was pretty incredible though, despite there being a very pesky cloud that showed up shortly before we reached “totality” or a 100% blocking out of the sun by the moon. We did see a few seconds of the totality, and we saw some amazing examples of the “diamond ring” which is when there is a very thin gold crescent that has a brighter bit that sort of moves from one end to the other. And we saw the sand shadows, or these weird squiggly shadowy lines that appear during the eclipse. Perhaps most amazing, and a real surprise, was the 360 degree sunset. During an eclipse, the whole horizon looks like a sunset. Who would have known?
Of course even an amazing celestial event takes place within a world of human drama. See the people behind us in this pic? Their son (not shown but right behind me) had just announced that he lost his phone moments before, due to an ill-advised decision to take it out of his pocket in the bathroom and set it down somewhere.) It was also as hot as I’ve ever felt, and extremely humid. We were soaked with sweat. The governor whom we don’t like was mingling in the crowd and I was formulating a plea to stop withholding money to Chicago Public Schools if he got near us. (He didn’t.) But then the sun disappears and you can forget all that!
We were behind this car for a while getting into Carbondale. The side window says “protect your pets eyes.”
John bought a baseball hat to try to deal with the oppressive sun, and in the process supported Southern Illinois University, home of the Salukis. See the dog picture I’m holding? They gave out hand fans (did I mention it was seriously hot?) with the photo of their mascot, the saluki, which I guess is a dog, on them.
And somewhere in Illinois on the way back we saw a DOUBLE RAINBOW!
The drive back to Chicago was very slow going. They don’t have highways that run 6 lanes in each direction down there, and a lot of people had travelled from Chicago. We got back to Urbana to spend the night around 10pm, and then drove in to the city Tues morning.
Back in the city… I was in the southern part of the Loop yesterday and liked the way these buildings fit together. The Roosevelt University (blue) building and CNA (red) building have a bit of a sun/moon eclipse relationship as you walk toward them. And the gorgeous creamy building with fire escape stairs is the lovely Auditorium Building by Adler and Sullivan.
Great post. This might be a silly question but did it feel any cooler when the sun disappeared or was the humidity the real killer heat-wise?
Actually that’s a great question. First, when the cloud arrived it was very bittersweet because it did lower the temp a bit. The temperature definitely dropped when the sun was more covered, but it would be interesting to experience that sometime (hopefully we will make it to more eclipse viewings in the future!) with a more moderate starting temperature!
Great pictures! So nice that you got to see a part of the total eclipse. The next total eclipse seven years in the future will be in April, so heat will not be a problem and Illinois will hopefully have a better governor. We will hope for clear skies.
We experienced a definite cooling of the air when the eclipse was total north of Kansas City, but there had been off and on clouds all morning.