Open Source: What is it like to see a solar eclipse?

MANSFIELD — Incomparable. Awe-inspiring. A memory that will last a lifetime.

On April 8, north central Ohio will be in the path of a total solar eclipse. The last time that happened was 1806 — just three years after Ohio became a state.

For many area residents, this will be our first (and possibly our last) chance to witness this astronomical phenomenon. But some locals have seen eclipses elsewhere.

We asked those readers to share their stories and photographs. We’re publishing those accounts in their own words, lightly edited for grammar and length.

‘You owe it to yourself to see a full solar eclipse’

Beau Shaw of Ontario emailed in a journal essay he wrote after traveling to see the 2017 solar eclipse:

“I am a bit of a science nerd. I first heard of the eclipse about a year ago. I then thought it might be fun to plan a trip to go see it.

I was going back and forth deciding if I should go through the hassle of dragging the kids (nine and five) two states away to watch the eclipse. I watched David Baron’s TED talk about total solar eclipses. His message was, “You owe it to yourself, in your lifetime, to see a full solar eclipse.” That video made up my mind for me.

The day before the eclipse, we drove 4 hours and stayed in a hotel in Louisville. On Monday, we woke up early and drove down to White House, Tennessee. I was still concerned if the whole trip was going to be worthwhile. Watching the moon pass in front of the sun was cool, most everyone reading this probably saw at least a partial eclipse and knows this.

What people who saw a 99 percent or less eclipse cannot appreciate is how amazing and awe-inspiring totality was. The world instantly went almost as dark as a night with a full moon. I was expecting it to slowly get darker. It was as if someone turned off a switch. The entire horizon was red like a 360-degree sunset. You could see stars and planets in the midday sky. You could safely look at the sun without special glasses. There was a black disk where the sun was and you could see the sun’s rays coming off of it. It was a magical one minute and twenty-eight seconds. I do not have the words to properly describe it. My friend whom I went with summed it up perfectly. She said, “I will never again, in my life, pass up an opportunity to see that.”

This morning I got home and carried my sleeping children to bed a little after 3 am. I had been awake for 20 hours and spent 14 hours of that day driving, much of it in terrible traffic.

Was it worth it? Let me just say, you owe it to yourself, in your lifetime, to see a full solar eclipse.”

‘Nothing can compare to totality’

Photographer Jeff Sprang captured extraordinary shots from a very ordinary setting — an empty church parking lot outside of Nashville.

“My wife Linda and I traveled to Tennessee in 2017 to view the total eclipse of the sun. We set up in an empty church parking lot (it was a Monday) in a rural area near Castilian Springs, not far from Nashville. It had taken us about seven hours of driving to get there. The weather was perfect with clear blue skies.

I had viewed and photographed an annular eclipse and several partial eclipses before but nothing can compare to totality. 

Paraphrasing Mark Twain: “The difference between a partial eclipse and a total eclipse is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” It really was awe-inspiring.

After the eclipse, we drove through the night for about 12 hours in traffic that was often bumper-to-bumper and sometimes at a complete standstill to get home in time for me to teach my photo class at the Ohio State University Mansfield campus at 9:45 on Tuesday morning. It was worth it.

We are very much looking forward to experiencing the April 8 eclipse with our family in our own backyard.”

‘The shortest two minutes I’ve ever experienced’

Mike Romine of Mansfield is a member of the Richland Astronomical Society, which operates the Warren Rupp Observatory. He traveled to Nashville the day before the 2017 solar eclipse.

“I traveled to a friend’s house with an 8 inch SCT telescope, a 70 mm scope, two cameras and a camcorder. The trip took about 8 hours, even with the construction delays. That allowed me to set up and polar align my telescope the night before. Even though it was Central Daylight Time, I still woke up ridiculously early, in anticipation of what was to come.

The temperature was about 95 degrees and very humid. During the partial phase of the eclipse, the shadows from the trees were crescent shaped, just like viewing the Sun with solar filtered glasses. 

Just prior to totality, the surrounding area darkened, but not like that of sundown. The color of the grass and trees was still very vibrant and it was like someone was turning down brightness on a TV. It does get dark at totality. Mars, Venus and some stars were very visible, just as Jupiter and Venus will be on eclipse day 2024.

I had never witnessed a total eclipse before and really didn’t know what to expect. I was amazed that I could see solar prominences with a naked eye, something that can normally only be seen with a dedicated Ha/Ca solar telescope. That was the shortest two minutes that I’ve ever experienced. 

I likened the experience to that of the birth of my daughter, 36 years earlier. 

The trip home was a long one. I saw the Sun rise as I pulled in my driveway. 

My tips for the 2024 eclipse are:

1. I can’t stress enough the importance of using solar filters, whether they are glasses or some other type of solar filter. You must use ISO approved solar filtered glasses or solar film. Even short exposures without them can cause serious eye damage.  Do not trust small children to keep their glasses on. Keep close watch on them at all times. Keep your solar glasses handy, the Sun will get very bright, quickly at the end of totality.

2. The same applies to cameras. If you leave a camera pointed at the Sun, without a filter, you will destroy the lens and possibly the sensor. Cellphones can be used unfiltered to take pictures, but you won’t see the shape of the Sun. All automatic cameras try to make a daylight scene, as a result you will get a bright ball, with no sign of an eclipse. You have to be able to control the exposure of the camera with or without a solar filter. Get out ahead of time and experiment with your camera settings, with solar filters attached. If you want to make solar filters for you lenses of telescopes, look here: Solar-Filter-101.pdf (wro.org)

3. Keep a flashlight handy, it does get dark.

4. If you plan to travel, plan to stay at the location you are at for several hours following the eclipse, unless you have a real good knowledge of less-traveled backroads. The main roads with be jam packed. Hopefully, ODOT won’t be doing lane closures that day. It took me one and a half hours to travel less than a mile, on I-71, inside Ohio, because of a very short lane closure. 

5. The Warren Rupp Observatory will not be open to the public.

Cynicism gave way to wonder

The “Great American Eclipse” of 2017 arrived at a time of turmoil for Amber Heston. Now an Ontario resident, Heston had just moved to Virginia at the time.

“My senses of resilience and rationality were hanging on by a single, vulnerable thread. Our wayworn family of four had just completed another cross-country move, courtesy of U.S. Army orders.

Our new home in Virginia was jammed with 20,000 lbs. of boxes that had just arrived from multiple states, waiting to be unpacked and dealt with. They would continue to wait. My husband was preparing to leave for a year of traveling the globe on a mission to train fellow U.S. soldiers around the world specialized skills in subterranean warfare, in advance of a potential conflict with elements of the “axis of evil.”

As for me, I had just been selected to head up a daily media briefing for a component of the U.S. government, which had me hunkered down in my home office monitoring the news around the clock.

I’d just enrolled our two children, then 9 and 6, in the local elementary school a mile and a half away — however, school wasn’t scheduled to start until well into the following month. In the meantime, our resourceful kiddos occupied themselves using the big brown boxes peppering our home for spirited games of hide-and-seek, Nerf barricades, and musical props ranging from stages to drum sets. It was a weird type of survival, but we were doing our best — even as it felt like the cosmos was committed to whatever type of alignment would most effectively disrupt any state of flow.

The big celestial event on August 21, 2017 just so happened to coincide with my birthday. Ordinarily, that would have been extra cause for celebration — however, as fate would have it, it was one of those milestone birthdays that few are genuinely excited about observing. Like the progressively darkening skies as the moon’s silhouette cast a gray shadow over the earth blocking out the sun’s light, I felt my future turning cold and colorless … and equally full of back pain, compression socks, and fiber supplements. All of it was a force of nature I could do nothing about, but apprehensively surrender.

In advance of the big day, my mirthful husband purchased all the eclipse party favors he could round up — certified eyewear for safe viewing, plastic drinking cups decorated with astronomical phenomena, and even a t-shirt for me with the quote, ‘I was on the path less traveled, the path of totality — August 21, 2017’ splashed across the front. I was not nearly as excited as he was about the day as a whole.

That Monday was busy for us both. He was at work 30 miles away and I managing the chaos at home, while racing against the clock to meet my daily news deadlines. As the afternoon progressed, the darkening sky paired well with my dreary mood.

‘It’s time, Mom — let’s go outside,’ my kids exclaimed with eager energy as they burst into my office with their safety viewing glasses in hand. They had clearly taken notice of the twilight-aura that had fallen, strikingly unusual for the early afternoon hour. I sighed internally as I struggled to find a pausing point in my work. My son handed me my own pair of safety glasses. I reluctantly stood up from my desk and aimed to muster an adequate level of enthusiasm: ‘OK kiddos – let’s go check it out.’

As soon as we stepped outside onto the front porch, rather than looking straight to the sky, our eyes were drawn instantly to the ground. Covering the concrete were hundreds of little crescent-shaped shadows — a phenomenon evidently caused by foliage filtering the light, creating natural pinhole lenses that project images of mini-crescents onto the ground below.

My kids immediately began jumping around. They erupted into a frenzied chorus of “BRUH!” with a few dab moves to follow. Hundreds of eclipse images adorning the ground just outside my front door was not what I had expected at all to see, as the curiosity of my kids — in addition to my own amazement — began to breach my hardhearted spirit and elevate my wonderment. This might really be neat.

‘Make sure your glasses are on tight, guys,’ I reminded my kids.

We each secured the cardboard arms of the solar viewing glasses behind our ears, and together, we looked up to a sight none of us will ever forget.

Hovering almost directly over our neighborhood was the most eerie yet enchanting version of the sun that I have ever seen. Due to the moon’s position, the sun appeared a mysterious arc, its sickle shape growing more narrow and subdued every moment as near-totality approached. It was as if the moon was swallowing up the sun. I contemplated with both mild amusement and a shudder the likely horror Earth’s earliest inhabitants must have felt when witnessing this occultation of the sun — the planet’s very source of warmth, light, and life — for the first time. I imagined it would be an existential dread that far overshadowed my own personal pity party over turning a certain age on a busy Monday.

In the vast scope of the world, my woes instantly felt trivial. The literal tons of boxes, perpetual news deadlines, military operations taking my husband far away for extended periods, another potential war and the inevitable concept of aging were all stressful, but hardly Earth-shattering. The rhythm of the cosmos assured me that, like the steadfast movements of the sun, the moon, and the Earth, everything would be OK.

Some cultures believe the occurrence of an eclipse symbolizes a rebirth of the sun. Some see it as the sun and moon embracing each other. The philosophy also exists that an eclipse marks a time to consciously leave what encumbers us in the past and to open a new chapter in life. I indeed sensed a combination of all these things. As the eclipse’s peak lapsed and the sun’s curved arc began to slowly regain its spherical form, returning color and light back to the world, a sense of comfort and promise transcended the preceding apprehension.

We all made our way back inside, removed our eclipse glasses, marveled at the science and spirit of what we had just witnessed and set about returning to our afternoon routine. The kids continued with the construction of their massive box fort. I tended to the relevant breaking news that occurred while we had paused life’s demands for a brief, marvelous moment to gaze at the sky above.

As evening fell, my husband returned home with my requested birthday dinner of Taco Bell. I continued working into the evening and life carried on as it does. It turns out, this decade of life was nothing to dread after all. It has been unexpectedly but without a doubt the best yet. With another “Great American Eclipse” on the horizon, I am looking forward to it with the highest level of joyful expectancy one could have. As long as Ohio’s skies are clear that day (fingers crossed!), we are all in for an astronomical treat – especially those extra special few for whom the event happens to coincide with their birthday … on a busy Monday … once again.”

Celebrating with a MilkyWay bar

Dana Pennell of Shelby experienced a partial solar eclipse while growing up in Berea, Ohio:

“I was probably 6 or 7 years old back in 1964 or 65. I do remember excitement. Franklin Drive was one of those streets with lots of families having small children. We often had block parties, where the street was closed off, picnic tables put out in the street and a potluck done. All the neighbors were acquainted. 

During the eclipse, all the neighbors were out. It was about mid to late afternoon. I remember my dad telling us not to look directly at the sun. He put a pair of sunglasses over a second pair to look at it. It became somewhat darker out, like a very overcast day. It was a big event for people that I still remember, to this day. I’m very much looking forward to this eclipse event. I’m ready with glasses my wife’s friend gave us, along with MilkyWay bars!”