It’s wilder than that. You feel the temperature drop around you. Animals start to freak out cause they think night has fallen. Even more crazy is shadow snakes. Where you see the shadows around you start to shimmer. Kind of like the shadows of atmospheric disturbances you see during really hot days or near a fire.

You can learn more about this in SmarterEveryDay’s video

And here’s a video that captures the shadow snakes

My unga bunga ancestors, absolutely surrounded by shadow snakes during an eclipse

Also, the overall tone of the light is wrong and it’s almost impossible to articulate why.

It’s not dark per se, but the light doesn’t just seem dimmed, it seems like it’s in a different spectrum.

It feels like when a movie puts a filter over the film to indicate that something very very bad is happening, like an eldritch horror has arrived offscreen, and the bad light is slowly sucking your soul out of your body, only it’s real life, and the bad light permeates everywhere.

Imagine being a caveman and looking up one day to see the sky has gone dark and what looks to be God’s eye is starting directly at you

I’ve been in a total solar eclipse before and, honestly, the most surprising thing to me was just how much the temperature drops, and how quickly it does, too