In August 2017, Nuwan and I left our 3 yo and 6-month-old baby in the trusting hands of daycare and a sitter to drive to Hopkinsville Kentucky aka Eclipesville to experience our first total solar eclipse. And that was a life changing, awe inspiring, jaw – dropping moment that I desperately wanted to relive for ourselves and create a new experience for our children.

8 April 2024 the moon cast its shadow on us, as the little rock eclipsed the sun in its entirety, visible right in our backyard. Totality was supposed to last for 3 mins and 45 seconds, a period during which we could look at the sun directly with our naked eyes without harm. And to witness we had family fly in from California and drive down from Chicago. There was a good hour long build up. Using eclipse glasses, we looked at the sun and a little part of it was bitten off, like a piece of bitten apple. Within the course of an hour (approximately) more and more of the sun was bitten off. The greater the coverage, the cooler it got… critters got louder, birds started chirping and our neighbors dog decided to start barking from the confusion. The diffused light is a perplexing situation, the skies were blue and clear, yet it was getting darker. It is so bizarre, there’s no other way to describe it.

Now something we didn’t experience in 2017 that we did this time, if you stepped into the house it was super dark, dark like when a storm is passing through. But when you look at the sky through the window you see blue skies. And my home has floor to ceiling windows in the living space.

We geeked up the joint by making a pinhole camera to observe the eclipse, which can be done safely without eclipse glasses since you’re looking at a show as opposed to staring at the sun. Nuwan then poked a bunch of holes and now we could see 9 sun-shadows. Kids got a kick out of this.

And finally the moment arrived where there was just a sliver of sun still peeking through, and then like magic a totally eclipsed sun put us into totality! The children, Vihaan especially, instantly started screaming, while my cousin and his wife stood in awe. I was uncontrollably laughing, as we all took off our eclipse glasses and started directly at the sun. We could see the corona, and solar flares. We could see planets in the sky, as bright stars, this was new to us. The 2017 eclipse didn’t get this dark. And we were all just dumbstruck, wonderstruck, in awe of the cosmos. As we were nearing the end of totality we saw the brilliant diamond ring and that was our queue to put the eclipse glasses back on. We were all buzzing from the excitement, Aarini wanted to create a time machine to experience it again. Vihaan was incomprehensible. All that build up, the anticipation, the nerves because it was supposed to be cloudy but wasn’t, was worth every single second of totality. Nuwan said, “That was Totality Awesome!”

Lastly, even with a tiny sliver of sun visible, it feels like there’s a spotlight on you. The tiniest crescent sun has the effect of floodlights. That’s how mighty our star is.

To have witnessed totality twice, been in the shadow of the moon, I am a self-declared umbraphile and a wannabe eclipse chaser. What a privilege!

P.S. It was supposed to be cloudy, which meant a good chance of missing totality. I had an Eclipse Playlist sorted but I didn’t play it, I didn’t want to jinx us. But for giggles, this was my playlist: Total Eclipse of the Heart (duh!), Ain’t No Sunshine, See You Again, Dark Side of the Moon, Steal My Sunshine, You are My Sunshine, Blinded by the Light, Fly Me to the Moon and when totality is finally over and the sun can be seen again end with Here Comes the Sun!