I hope you got to see at least part of the eclipse today. We didn’t drive into totality as we had planned, but we did get 67%, the fuzzy shadows, and the crescent shadows:

I grabbed a few screenshots off of the NASA feed, including the “diamond ring” over Dallas and Bailey’s Beads over Arkansas, two places we could have traveled to.

Finally, my cousin Dan in the Dallas area sent pictures he made from his backyard:

The heavens still declare the glory of God!

Other lessons? My son Mark said, “We made the best decision we could have based on the data we had.” True. In this case, the cloud predictions were (thankfully) wrong, and I’m happy for all the people who were able to see the eclipse. And, just as “a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions” (see Luke 12.15), a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his exotic experiences either. We saw a total eclipse in 2017 and an annular eclipse in October 2023. It would have been nice to see this one…nice but not essential.

Bob (left), Mark (far right), granddaughter Kesley (in front of me) and two other friends in 2017, western Nebraska. The “lifesaver” at the top of the picture is the total eclipse.