US goes mad for eclipse:
Mark Cansler, a Kentucky farmer, was somewhat bemused when he learned he had won the cosmic lottery. As a vast 70-mile-wide swathe of America, from Oregon in the west to South Carolina in the east, was plunged into darkness with the total eclipse, Mr Cansler’s otherwise unremarkable 70-acre farm was at the centre of the madness.
According to Nasa, the point of greatest eclipse, where the sun and moon lined up most perfectly, was in one of his fields 11 miles outside the small former tobacco town of Hopkinsville.
“It’s hot here in Kentucky, so we mostly spend our time looking for shade, not looking at the sun,” Mr Cansler told The Daily Telegraph as he stood in an old wooden barn in the field, the sound of cows in the distance.
As more than 2 min 40 sec of darkness began, people in the field shouted “Here come the little green men” and stared skyward.
Looking up in awe, Dot Thomas, 60, said: “It’s like when men landed on the moon, just amazing that something like this can really happen. I never dreamt I’d see this. It’s fantastic, a grand finale like at the end of fireworks but better.”
Brooke Jung, Hopkinsville’s eclipse coordinator, who spent years preparing the town for the event, said: “It was absolutely breathtaking. It looked like the sun had been swallowed. An absolutely amazing experience.”
Her husband Chris Jung said: “For years it was 24/7 eclipse talk in our house. But it was worth the wait. It was something beautiful that left me gasping for more. The 360-degree sunset was something I wasn’t expecting, just beautiful.”
It was the first total eclipse on the US mainland since 1979, and the first
‘It’s like when men landed on the moon, just amazing that something like this can really happen’
coast-to-coast one since 1918. Some 12million people live in the 70-milewide, 2,500-mile-long zone where the sun was totally blocked out
Another 200million were within a day’s drive of the path of totality, meaning it was almost certainly the most observed and photographed such event ever, and the one with the most traffic gridlock. It was also the first total eclipse to pass through such a populated area in the social media age.
Nasa had a plane follow the eclipse as it moved across the US and sent up balloons to film it, while astronauts made observations on the International Space Station.
In Depoe Bay, Oregon, just south of the first spot to see totality, thick fog shrouded the water, with the sun hidden behind a curtain of mist and clouds. Totality took its final bow near Charleston, South Carolina, where eclipse gazers gathered atop the harbour’s sea wall.
In Mr Cansler’s field Nasa set up a command centre to observe and broadcast the celestial phenomenon.
Hordes of people descended on the field from around America and the world, some clutching eclipse glasses, others arriving in giant mobile homes that had to steer round the horsedrawn buggies of the local Amish community.
Next to an array of space-age Nasa contraptions stood Ona The Voodoo Bone Lady of New Orleans, holding her slithering Chinese rat snakes Damballah and Ellegua.
“An eclipse generates a huge amount of energy which can be used for whatever purposes,” said Ona, explaining why she had driven nine hours from New Orleans. “Voodoo can be positive. There is so much hate and discord in the world now and I want to use it to pray for people.”
Matt Bevin, the governor of Kentucky, arrived in the field by helicopter. “I’m just excited that the perfect place to watch it is right here in our state,” he said. “For me, as a big kid, this is fun, and it’s great for the economy.”
Around Hopkinsville residents enthusiastically cashed in, renting out their homes, gardens and fields to campers for suitably stratospheric sums. There were also indications of eclipse-induced religious fervour in Kentucky, a Bible Belt state. A sign outside one Baptist church read: “The eclipse is coming. So is Jesus!”