Eclipse Day is here

Visiting downtown Niagara Falls over the last few days I was underwhelmed by the quantity of visitors. It seemed roughly equivalent to a busy summer weekend not the overwhelming mass predicted.

At 8:20 a.m. I checked the bridge traffic this morning. The wait was about as expected. 12 to 15 minutes at Lewiston Queenston and little elsewhere.

The highlight of the eclipse, at least for me, was hearing the NASA scientists speak, especially heliophysicist David Cheney.

Cheney said as a meteorologist employed by the Navy one of his responsibilities was predicting space weather.

In a non-electronic world, that wouldn’t matter but in our current state, with phones and the internet as integral parts of our daily lives, it becomes more important.

Cheney said in the Navy, his role was important because of the electronics involved in defense and aviation are ahead of the civilian world.

We also visited the Underground Railroad Heritage Museum and listened to Saladin Allah tell the tale of pre-Civil War slave migration.

At the Niagara Aerospace Museum we arrived a bit late but caught the tail end of a talk and checked out the museum, which we had never seen before. As I finish writing this it is cloudy.

I suspect it will stay so and other than darkness and a temporary chill the eclipse will disappoint because of the clouds. Wide Right, as Frank Mariani would draw it.