Buchanan Lake lies about 50 miles northwest of Austin, Texas, in a rural setting with Inks Lake State Park and Inks Lake on its southeastern border. Buchanan Lake also lies directly in the path of the April 8, 2024, total solar eclipse of the sun. NASA predicts that the duration of the total eclipse will last 4 minutes and 24 seconds. The entire event from beginning to end will last 2 1/2 hours.
NASA supplies most of the scientific and timeline information on the April 8, 2024, eclipse informational websites. There are several phases of a total eclipse. The partial eclipse, or the beginning of the total eclipse, at Buchanan Lake is expected to begin on Monday, Apr 8, 2024, at 1:36 p.m. and ends Monday, Apr 8, 2024, at 2:57 p.m.
Preparing for the Eclipse
As of this writing, it looks like Buchanan Lake is preparing for a large influx of visitors during the eclipse. The Buchanan Lake Dam is a good place to watch the eclipse. We have to remember that viewing an eclipse is a matter of luck when it comes to cloudy skies and April is about nine months away from the date of this article.
A total solar eclipse comprises five phases. The first contact, or partial eclipse, is when it looks like the moon took a bite out of the sun. For the first hour and a half after first contact, the sky increasingly darkens. The second contact occurs just a few minutes before the total eclipse. Birds might quiet down, and some animals may change eating and sleeping habits at this point.
The total eclipse happens when the moon completely covers the sun. The sky darkens more, and you may see a ring of light around the moon, called a “ring of fire” eclipse, which is an annular eclipse. The fourth and fifth contacts appear in reverse of the first and second contacts. A persistent myth exists that total solar eclipses happen once in a lifetime. But, that is not true depending on where on earth you live.
Every year, somewhere on earth, two to five partial eclipses occur per year. Total eclipses happen about every 18 months somewhere around the globe. The eclipses begin when the moon passes between the earth and the sun. We view eclipses as they travel from west to east. The earth orbits the sun while rotating, and the moon orbits the earth in 27.3 days.
The U.K. and Western Europe see the fewest eclipses than the rest of the world. The U.K.’s last eclipse occurred on August 11, 1999. NASA publishes a webpage with tables of eclipse calendars up to the year 3,000 and dating back to 1901. The eclipses are listed in tables of decades, a twenty-year solar eclipse calendar of paths, and a century catalog, plus a map of eclipse paths.
Humans find eclipses fascinating and awe-inspiring, and have recorded eclipses that we know of since ancient Chinese scribes in Anyang wrote this about eclipses: “The sun has been eaten”. These scribes recorded eclipse dates on tortoise shells and oxen shoulder blades, called oracle bones, in 1226 B.C., 1198 B.C., 1172 B.C., 1163 B.C., and 1161 B.C. In today’s Syria, ancient Babylonians recorded solar eclipse on clay tablets, and their earliest recorded one was on May 3, 1375, B.C.
One of the best seen total solar eclipses in the U.S. occurred in 1878 in Fort Worth, Texas, and it was the first recorded eclipse in Texas. The University of North Texas’ Portal to Texas History houses this event in pictures. Leonard Waldo, R.W. Wilson, J.K. Rees, W.H. Pulsifer, F.E. Seagrave, Alfred Freeman, and A.M. Britton, all astronomers, landed at the S.W. Lomax farm to view the eclipse with different models of telescopes.
One hundred years earlier, in 1778, David Rittenhouse, an early American astronomer, published his record of the June 24, 1778, total solar eclipse in one of the first volumes of the American Philosophical Society. This total eclipse began in the Pacific Ocean and journeyed eastward, near Pennsylvania. Thomas Jefferson lived in Virginia at the time.
It was too cloudy for Jefferson to see that eclipse in Virginia, and he was terribly disappointed. Jefferson wrote a letter to Rittenhouse expressing his sadness. He asked Rittenhouse to please send him a timepiece that was more advanced and “for astronomical purposes only”. We keep on with our fascination of eclipses, as did ancient humans.