My eclipse was overcast, and that was better than I expected.
My cell phone camera had been compensating for the light as I took occasional pictures as the light slowly dimmed before totality, but I discovered that video was a lot more representative.
As totality arrived, I spent my time actually looking directly at my surroundings, but I was also holding up my cell phone recording what I was looking at.
This is a still from that video from during totality, looking south. There's just a little bit of light visible in distant clouds. A fire is in the foreground. A person in a light-colored shirt standing less than two meters from the camera is barely visible at the left side. The clouds are dark. The overall illumination is similar to deep twilight.
A minute and a half later, totality is nearly ending, and the southern clouds are just starting to light up noticeably.
This is a similar viewpoint to the first picture, several meters to the west. The exposure is similar, as shown by the fire, but now waves are clearly visible from reflected cloudlight, and totality has passed not far away.
Merely 30 seconds later, totality is definitely past, colors have returned, and illumination has gone from deep twilight to feeling like early evening in about a minute. Again, the fire shows that the exposure hasn't changed substantially across the three pictures.
The three pictures are blurred because they are screen grabs from video shot in low light. But they reasonably accurately show the experience of darkness in totality with a fairly thick overcast.
If we had known for certain that we'd be watching a deeply overcast eclipse, we probably wouldn't have done an approximately 12-hour trek to visit friends in the finger lake district of NY. But we agreed with them that actually experiencing an overcast eclipse was not the disappointment we had been expecting as we saw the weather forecast shift during the morning from this location being a hole in the clouds to a deep overcast.
Like the mostly-clear total eclipse we saw in 2017, this was truly awe-inspiring.
The rain that started seconds after that final picture didn't dampen the experience. ☺
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