MANSFIELD — Eight-year-old Gabe Atwell wiggled his arms and legs, bouncing a bit as he sat in a red foldable lawn chair outside The Ohio State Reformatory. His cardboard eclipse glasses whipped back and forth in his hand.
“Twelve minutes!” he declared in a sing-song voice.
It was 3 p.m. and a blue gray tint hung in the atmosphere, as if to warn of a sudden summer thunderstorm.
But fortunately for the hundreds who had traveled to Mansfield, the skies were clear.
Atwell’s mother Kristin sat beside him. Gabe wants to be an astronaut one day. His school granted him an excused absence for the solar eclipse, so the family traveled from their home in Huntington, West Virginia.
“We’re only at 90 percent or something in Huntington, so we decided to go all out and find a cool place,” she said. “This is where I dropped a pin on Google Maps.”
Around 1,100 people traveled to the Reformatory’s “Eclipse in the Yard” event Monday to take in the total solar eclipse, according to a guide at OSR. Many of those in attendance said they chose the location because it allowed them to experience the eclipse and take a tour of the Reformatory all in one day.
“There’s no cooler place to watch the eclipse than the Shawshank Prison,” said Darcy Conner, who traveled from Williamstown, West Virginia with her husband.
Conner sat on a picnic blanket with her family, including her sister-in-law Jamie Peyton, of Asheville, North Carolina.
Peyton said the group had been planning to watch the eclipse together since she took in her first eclipse seven years ago.
“I just thought it was amazing, almost like a spiritual experience in a way,” she said. “I don’t think people that aren’t in full totality understand how cool it is. So we made a plan in 2017 that we were going to travel for the 2024.”
They weren’t the only family who traveled from different states to watch the eclipse together.
Brothers-in-law Matt Lindsey and Steve Dascot spent the day in Mansfield with their wives and sons. The Dascots hail from Michigan; the Lindseys live in Baltimore.
Like Peyton, Lindsey insisted on a family get-together after seeing the 2017 eclipse.
“It was just the most stunning natural phenomena I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Lindsey, an amateur astronomer and photographer.
“It was something otherworldly. Watching the sun go dark in the middle of the afternoon, it was pretty amazing.”
Lindsey and other amateur photographers and astronomers adjusted their tripods bit by bit as the hours passed, ensuring they’d be in the perfect position once totality began.
Les Davies, a political advisor from Reynoldsburg, said he’d been practicing his solar photography in advance.
“A couple of weeks ago there was a full moon, so I dialed in my focus on my camera and I taped my focal range so it didn’t move,” he said. “I’ve been photographing the sun over the last week to get the settings I want to use to take the pictures.”
Sumam Ghosh didn’t need to practice. Monday marked his third solar eclipse.
Ghosh got his first glimpse of totality near his hometown of Calcutta, India in 1995. He later immigrated to the United States and settled in Pittsburgh, where he works in software development. He traveled to Tennessee in 2017 to see the solar eclipse.
“You just have to see it once. The day turns into night. The temperature drops. You can see stars in the daytime,” he described. “Once you see that, you basically get hooked into seeing it again.”
After monitoring the weather, Ghosh chose to drive to Mansfield Monday morning.
“It looked like this area might have a little break from clouds, so I took the chance,” he said.
Fortunately, the weather cooperated Monday with 70-degree temperatures and blue skies.
Families and old friends chatted while a DJ blasted pop hits. Kids competed for prizes in limbo and hula hooping.
As the late morning stretched into early afternoon, visitors popped their glasses on for brief glances upward.
In the hours leading up to totality, the sun appeared normal to the naked eye. From behind the glasses, however, spectators could watch as the orange orb ebb slowly from a sphere to a sliver.
By 3 p.m. the air was noticeably chillier than before. The sky grew noticeably darker until it reached a post-dusk darkness.
At 3:12 p.m., the crowd of visitors cheered as a silver blue halo appeared in the sky. Totality had arrived.
Gabe Atwell stared up the sky and pointed out a pair of planets, visible to the naked eye.
“That could be Venus right there,” he said.
He hopped up and stood beside his mother. She wrapped an arm around him and they gazed up at the sky.
“It did not think it was going to be so dramatic,” she said minutes later as the sun reappeared. “It was moving.”
