In Seattle Monday, people flocked to the streets to view the 92-percent eclipse of the sun.
Starting promptly at 9:08 a.m. some donned their eclipse glasses if they were lucky enough to snag some, others braved blindness, and still others made pinhole projectors, a means to view the progress of the eclipse without directly looking at it.
Here are a few sights and scenes from around our offices in Pioneer Square:
A couple sitting outside Elm Coffee Roasters: “We got these glasses on Amazon, one day delivery.” When asked about their legitimacy, the man frowned slightly. “I mean, I hope they’re real,” he said, turning the glasses over in his hand, most likely looking for certification.
“When I went to buy them they were almost all sold out so I had to get a pair for kids,” one man, with eclipse glasses too small for his face, said.
People shared coveted eclipse glasses. One man went up to strangers and asked if they’d had a chance to look. “Please, take your time,” he said, pressing his pair into their hands.
“With sunglasses, it looks crisper,” a man said to his wife. (That may have just been his retinas burning.)
“Animals were acting strange,” one guy told his friend. “I saw birds flying toward Tacoma when it got darker and then turning around the other way when it got bright again.”
An old man squinted at the sun before turning around. “I don’t want to go blind!” He yelled, miming as if his eyes were burning before putting on his solar eclipse glasses. “Sorry that’s really not funny, but you know, topical.”
“I think it’s cool that we got this much visibility here in Seattle where it rains all the time,” an older man said to me, his ‘eclipse 2017’ button catching the sunlight. “Some suckers went all the way to Eastern Oregon, which, good for them but the thing lasted like, what, two minutes?”
A teenage girl scoffed at the unbridled enthusiasm around her, “This isn’t the purge, guys.”
A man was unimpressed with the viewing party he was attending. “This is very easy,” he said, “you can plan this out 50 years in advance.”
“What if we all totally misjudged this and this was an event that turned us all into lizard people,” someone muttered, conspiratorially.
Amid the excited din: “What do you think of the LimeBikes and the Spin bikes?”
