Our staff is sharing its eclipse stories and photos from today. The post will be updated as more come in.

OAKLAND, Calif.—Oakland and the surrounding Bay Area are well-known for morning fog, particularly in the summertime. So despite having two telescopes and the helpful staff at the Chabot Space & Science Center, the clouds unfortunately didn’t cooperate. Nevertheless, that didn’t stop hundreds of people from gathering along the observation deck, near the historic telescopes named Leah and Rachel. Most people had brought protective eyewear or had made pinhole boxes, but with the cloud cover blocking the Sun anyway, they quickly figured out that they wouldn’t be able to see the Sun with them on. Attendees squealed and yelped with joy as they attempted to view what was left of the Sun peeking out from behind the Moon and the thick white cloud cover. Your correspondent caught a few glimpses of the partially eclipsed and cloud-covered Sun for just a few moments.

Meanwhile, my sister-in-law, Kelly Guyon, 28, who traveled north from Oakland, California, to Madras, Oregon, to observe totality, has declared herself an “eclipse chaser” now.

Angel Villadarez

Angela Calcaterra

Elise Hudson

Elise Hudson

Elise Hudson

Steven Klein

Aurich Lawson

Sam Machkovech

Lee Hutchinson

Cyrus Farivar

Cyrus Farivar

Joe Mullin

Joe Mullin

David Kravets

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Nathan Mattise

Nathan Mattise

Nathan Mattise

Nathan Mattise

Nathan Mattise

Nathan Mattise

SEATTLE—My neighborhood Fred Meyer’s store had a giant box of Eclipse Shades (ISO 12312-compliant) for sale starting one month ago. I’d seen the box teeming with eclipse-ready glasses for weeks, and that only changed on Friday, when the store's doors were covered in “OUT OF ECLIPSE GLASSES” signs.

But from what I saw around my north Seattle neighborhood of Greenwood on Monday morning, you could have skated by without your own pair for our city's near-eclipse. As our sky tip-toed toward totality, every store and café on the block—and even its legendary "open at 6am" bar—had a crowd of onlookers sharing glasses and offering passersby a quick “you gotta see this” lend. I stopped at my favorite café in the neighborhood, Chocolati, whose front porch has plenty of seating near an open view of the east, to take in a lovely, cloudless view. The crowd was pretty much the same you'd see at Chocolati on a given Monday at 10am, including students, work-from-home laptoppers, and retired men and women.

The scene was friendly and casual, though admittedly chattier than on a normal day. One retired woman told me she had been bussed out to Washington’s Yakima Valley for the last total eclipse in 1979 for a school trip. After telling me this, she rushed to offer her eclipse glasses to a man who’d stopped his car and asked us about how the eclipse was going. A few people had all but demanded he stop his car and look, which he did through his car window while quickly borrowing the retiree’s glasses. “Wow,” I could hear him say from my vantage point.

While Seattle didn’t see a totality, the view was still pretty great, with a bright crescent shape forming around the Moon’s silhouette. You can see a facsimile on the leaf pattern I photographed on my way back to my home once the maximum near-eclipse point had been reached.

Sam Machkovech, Tech Culture Editor

Evanston, WY—I caught the solar eclipse off route 80 in Evanston, WY on my way from Boise, ID to Denver, CO. Although I wanted to drive north to see totality, circumstances wouldn't permit it. Nevertheless, my husband and I had the right eclipse glasses so we pulled over in a Walmart parking lot where we caught somewhere in the range of 90 percent of totality.

Some 10 minutes out of the moment of greatest eclipse (which was set for around 11:35am), the colors of the world around us started getting paler and the world just sort of looked...off. We could see the Moon moving in front of the Sun with the glasses. It was wonderful to see that celestial body move so slowly to my eyes and think about how fast the Earth and Moon were really moving. At the time of greatest eclipse, most of the Walmart employees came outside to gaze at the phenomenon too. I was surprised how much light still surrounded us—even with 90 percent of the body of the Sun blocked by the Moon, it hardly looked like the day-turned-to-night that had been described by eclipse websites for totality. Still, the moment definitely had an odd feel, like we were on another planet, further from its star.

Maybe I imagined it, or the breeze temporarily kicked up, but mid-day on that Walmart blacktop seemed to get cooler, too. As the Sun started peeking back out, I tried to get a few more pictures but nothing came out great. I was hoping to see some off animal behaviors too, but nothing definitively odd happened. Some birds flew from one tree to the next, but I could only imagine whether that was eclipse-related. The dogs took it in stride, too: after years of dealing with weird human behavior, they were unconcerned with this spontaneous pit stop.

Megan Geuss, Staff Editor

NEW YORK-The eclipse had the feel of a race against time. The skies were slightly overcast to start the day, but the Sun was clearly visible through the clouds. My balcony has a view to the west, though, and I could see thicker clouds edging in from that direction as the morning slipped in to afternoon. By around 2pm, the Sun had edged around the building enough to be visible from my west-facing balcony. So I popped my eclipse glasses on and stumbled outside using my peripheral vision.

There was clearly a chunk missing from the Sun, and the clouds were still limited to a low slice of the sky to the west. The show was on. By 2:05, as I was typing this, things were looking noticeably dimmer, and I worried that a cloud I hadn’t noticed had sneaked over the Sun. Fortunately not—things just move quickly, and a lot more of the Sun was obscured.

While all the nearby roofs were empty when I first stepped outside, a handful of people appeared nearby as things got close to the peak of the eclipse, and I managed to share my glasses with a neighbor despite a major language barrier. The glasses also did double-duty, acting as a camera filter.

As 2:40, roughly the time of the maximum coverage came up, the light took on that distinct eclipse quality, and the view through the eclipse glasses was spectacular. There's something that, for me, is deeply satisfying for seeing it and is pushing me to make sure I see a totality on my next chance. I’m typically unlucky when it comes to natural beauty and cloud cover—I’ve missed the Matterhorn and Mt. Cook/Aoraki twice because of it. But in this case, I got lucky. The clouds started rolling through at 2:42.

John Timmer, Senior Science Editor

Eric Bangeman

Eric Bageman

Eric Bangeman

Kerry Staursteth

Kerry Staursteth

Kerry Staursteth

Phil Staursteth

John Timmer

John Timmer

John Timmer

John Timmer

John Timmer

Nate Anderson

Nate Anderson

Timothy Lee

Timothy Lee

Timothy Lee

Forrest Marvez

Forrest Marvez

PARK RIDGE, Ill.—Chicago was outside the total eclipse area, but we were promised 89-percent coverage during the peak of the eclipse—if the skies cooperated. Unfortunately, the skies were covered with a thin overcast on a hot, humid Midwestern afternoon. That didn’t stop some of my neighbors in northwest suburban Park Ridge from watching the eclipse from their driveways.

As the Sun was covered, the atmospheric light took on the surreal quality that comes just before or after a severe thunderstorm. A few crickets began tentatively chirping as the afternoon reached peak darkness, and a couple of other insects I generally hear only at night briefly joined in. But it wasn’t a full-blown evening chorus.

Outside Lincoln Middle School in Park Ridge, Mr. Duerkop’s eighth-grade science class took in the eclipse while wearing cardboard viewing glasses. They’d look up in the sky in unison for a few seconds, and then look back down upon the teacher’s signal. Mr. Duerkop let me borrow his glasses, and, even through the overcast skies, the crescent of the Sun shining behind the lunar disk was startling.

Eric Bangeman, Managing Editor

HOUSTON-Houston/Clear Lake got eclipsed its hardest (~66 percent) around 1:16 pm. The day before, my wife and I went to a new Oaxacan place for Houston Restaurant Weeks, because the only thing Houstonians like more than bitching about traffic and the heat is gorging ourselves until we regret the day we were born. So I started the day of the eclipse with a bike ride to work off the self-loathing. Nothing says “sun-related” like going outside when it’s 95 (that’s temperature and humidity).

Around 11:00, I felt like I was covered in margarine. Around 11:45, the temperature dropped. The pavement turned a different shade of gray even though the shadows kept their sharpness. I put down my kickstand and looked through the flimsy eclipse glasses I’d gotten off Amazon.

A crescent Sun. It had started.

Around 12:45, I rode past Johnson Space Center to a beer garden where they throw ice in their urinals, which gives a man a real sense of accomplishment. They were celebrating the eclipse with $2 drafts, and heavyset day-drinkers who contract for JSC were showing off pinhole cameras they had made from cereal boxes. Eclipse glasses were passed around, and a woman who had just gotten engaged shrieked something like “OH MY GOD I DIDN’T CARE BEFORE BUT THIS IS AMAZING!”

By 1:45, the coolness had gone away. The pavement was back to the white-gray of a museum skull, and only Ziegen Bock was still $2. The pinhole cereal box was abandoned on an empty table while its creator presumably dragged his ass back onsite to do a safety analysis for the ISS.

To quote Roger Ebert, “it all happens in this blink of a lifetime, surrounded by the realms of unimaginable time and space.”

Peter Opaskar, Line Editor

AUSTIN, TX—By 10am local time, eclipse FOMO officially set in. My wife and her several hundred schoolchildren would have glasses. The science museum within a 10-minute bike ride did, too. But until the very last second, foolish me tisk-tisked the idea that the Moon coming between Austin, Texas and the sun could be cool, nevermind moving.

Luckily, the Internet stopped the presses on the usual fodder, and things like #ResignTrump and #GameOfThrones quickly receded in favor of inescapable #SolarEclipse2017. I gave in and all the information awaited me. I knew immediately that my DSLR wouldn’t survive direct photos, that Texas would be only a so-so position for full spectacle, and that cardboard boxes would be my best bet in the eleventh hour.

Having purchased a bike rack recently, a roughly three-foot cardboard box soon transformed into my eclipse viewing machine and off I pedaled (slowly, awkwardly given this thing’s size) to the closest park. If you didn’t know the eclipse was happening, nothing on the scene would’ve tipped you otherwise. People moved into coffee shops, others walked dogs, runners kept running. Austin only experienced 73 percent of the total eclipse, so things stayed as sunny as usual (albeit, a few degrees noticeably cooler). But there I stood, center of a fairly large field, staring down into a cardbox box.

Admittedly, the lo-fi visual did wow. This kind of geeky DIY science hasn’t entered my life since middle school, but this 30-something with his face oddly in a cardboard box felt no self-consciousness. In fact, as I packed up my gear and prepared to meander back home post-apex, a woman in her 50s stopped me. “Have you seen it with glasses yet?” she exclaimed. “You have to.”

Thus, a retired science teacher quickly added me to her list of successes. After enjoying the apex herself, she started moving around the area as quickly as possible to make sure others could actually try her specs and see the inspiring interstellar image firsthand. Plus, of course, she had to tell everyone to put 2024 in their calendars—Austin will be in the path of totality after all.

Nathan Mattise, Features Editor