When my husband, Ed and I learned that a total eclipse would pass near Toronto on April 8th, we got excited. After all, we’re Trekkies and space nerds. The next total eclipse near Toronto won’t take place until 2106, so if we didn’t see this one, it was now or never.
Toronto would only view a partial eclipse. I’d witnessed one once before in the 1990s. A business friend and I broke away from our lunch near Yonge and Bloor and rushed out for a look, allowing ourselves only 1 or 2 second glimpses so we wouldn’t burn out our retinas. At the max of the shadow, all went still. Traffic stopped. The only sound was birdsong: very cool.
Back then Ed made a pinhole camera for our daughter for them to watch the moon cross the sun. Now, 30 years later, he made another and ordered safe viewing glasses from Amazon that resembled retro cardboard 3-D movie glasses. Fingers crossed they worked!
To see the full eclipse meant a drive to Hamilton or Niagara Falls. News reports said The Falls were expecting 100,000+ people so we opted for Hamilton. Somewhere on Hamilton Mountain surely we’d find a spot.
Getting there proved to be a challenge. Sadly the news reports weren’t wrong. Highway 407, the toll road, looked as clogged as Highway 401 at rush hour. Time was running out and we were beginning to lose hope when Ed remembered that the path of the total eclipse passed through Burlington.
We turned off the 407 and raced down to Burlington and Lake Ontario. Not too much traffic, thank God. We parked on a residential street and made the long walk down to the lakeshore, armed with our safety glasses and trusty pinhole camera. Bolstered with refreshments from Tim Hortons, we found a spot in Spencer Smith Park right next to the lake near a large hotel called appropriately enough, The Waterfront Hotel.
Spectators were in a festive mood. Hotel staff were giving their outdoor cafe patrons eclipse glasses. They continued to hand out glasses to the nearby crowd – even to drivers who’d slowed down and parked to view the spectacle.
Then we waited – and waited. It started slowly with a tiny edge of dark crescent. Overall daylight stayed bright. Yet incrementally over the next 20 minutes, the light dimmed to the level of a cloudy day.
“Maybe this is as good as it gets,” my husband mused. Indeed during the partial eclipse many years ago the noon day light dimmed to early twilight.
Then it happened: the moon moved over the sun and we saw the corona. A few seconds later, the light went out. Exactly that: midnight! All the night lights of the city came on: the streetlights, the restaurant and store signs. The sun was gone – snuffed out.
And it got cold. All I could think of were those retro science documentaries we’d seen as children: all life comes from the sun….No kidding. How long would it take for the earth to cool down to the Absolute Zero of outer space?
Then the moon moved away and the light came back. Spectators cheered and applauded. For a short time, a warm camaraderie shared by tiny denizens on Earth.
