Clouds don’t stop eclipse experience
Houstonians eager to witness spectacle despite less-than-ideal views
Eclipse chasers awoke Monday to gloomy weather forecasts, but many still took up posts along the path of totality hoping the clouds would part for the celestial show.
Some parts of Texas were lucky, and observers got clear views of the sun’s corona — its outermost atmosphere — as it shone like a halo around the moon. Others caught glimpses between the cloud coverage, and some couldn’t see the sun at all but noticed the darkness brought on by its sudden absence.
Passengers who boarded planes hoping for a better view also faced challenges. The 30 people aboard a JSX flight from Dallas sunk to the plane floor, contorted their bodies and craned their necks to view the sun-moon interaction out the windows.
“It was pretty awesome,” said 15-year-old Susan Rivera, a student who won a spot on the flight that departed Dallas Love Field. “I saw the entire thing. I had to twist my neck and body a little bit to see it.”
The total solar eclipse completely blocked the sun for 12.8 million Texans living from Eagle Pass to Texarkana. Visitors came from other parts of the country and the world while scientists captured video, launched helium balloons and studied animal behaviors. And then many people surrendered themselves to traffic after the spectacle, with Texas 71 between Austin and Bastrop among the areas backed up.
Houston wasn’t in the path of totality, but many stepped outside Monday afternoon in hopes of glimpsing the partial eclipse. At its peak, the moon blocked 94 percent of the sun.
“I see it! I see it!’ students shouted repeatedly on the basketball court outside of Anderson Elementary School in southwest Houston. “It looks like an orange pepper!” observed one fourth-grader.
The spectacle began near Eagle Pass, one of the first Texas cit
ies to go dark. The clouds in the border city parted just before totality, stayed away for the show and then returned.
Juan Laurel, 68, from Houston, cried.
“It’s beautiful,” he said. “Great experience.”
The moon’s shadow then cut a northeastward path across the state, crossing Uvalde, northwest San Antonio, Kerrville, Fredericksburg and Johnson City.
NASA held an event in Kerrville. The crowd in Louise Hays Park was smaller than anticipated, but it still swelled to several thousand. Cheers erupted as daylight faded and the total eclipse began. The gray skies hid the event for almost its entire duration. But those who saw it for seconds swear they’ll remember it forever.
“There’s something about the people, the camaraderie of it all,” said Emilie Casebolt, 32, who traveled from St. Paul, Minn., to watch the eclipse. “You feel a connection to the people around, connection with the Earth. I can understand completely why it spurred religions or added to lore and whatnot.”
Others were less pleased. John Dsouza of Boston did just about everything he could to ensure a clear view of the eclipse.
He downloaded 20 years’ worth of weather data and analyzed historical cloud cover on and around April 8, before ultimately deciding the Texas Hill Country had the highest probability of clear skies. On Monday, there was better visibility projected for Maine and Vermont, much closer to home.
“We gave up clear skies to come to cloudy skies,” he said as he and his family prepared to head west from Johnson City.
As the eclipse traveled northeast, the skies seemed to clear. The Austin area caught glimpses of totality in between clouds. Corsicana didn’t have many clouds. And at another NASA event in Dallas, this one hosted with NOAA and the National Science Foundation, the clouds parted just in time for viewers to experience more than three minutes of totality.
The eclipse then left Texas through Oklahoma and Arkansas, continuing across the U.S. and into Canada.
Thousands of Houston ISD students watched the solar eclipse with glasses provided by astronauts and representatives from Space Center Houston who traveled to four HISD schools on Friday to teach the students about the occurrence.
Neither Houston’s geography — which was not in the path of totality — nor the gray skies dampened the Anderson elementary schoolers’ spirit. Hundreds of children shrieked in excitement every time the clouds parted enough to reveal a sliver of sun peeking out from behind the moon, their volume directly correlated to the intensity of the light shining in their eclipse glasses.
And many Houstonians who drove elsewhere hoping for a more dazzling eclipse experience likely sat in traffic coming home.
Tina Beatty, a 44-year-old from Houston who traveled to Austin over the weekend to watch the eclipse with family, sat in slow-moving traffic with hundreds of others while driving through Bastrop on the outskirts of Greater Austin after the spectacle. It took the family more than an hour to drive the 30 miles from the capital city to a Buc-ee’s along Texas 71.
“The eclipse was beautiful, but we had some trouble on the way back,” she said.
Milon Briggs, 48, a Galleriaarea oil and gas engineer, and his family had a similar experience: “It was a bit congested, but not as bad as we expected.”
While the website Great American Eclipse forecasted as many as 720,000 people could visit Texas for the eclipse, residents in several Hill Country cities said the crowds were similar to a busy weekend during peak tourist season.
It will be 20 years before another total solar eclipse crosses the contiguous U.S., which made Monday notable for both eclipse chasers and scientists.
Citizen CATE 2024 stationed eight of its 35 nationwide teams in Texas. Amateur astronomers used special cameras, with builtin polarized lenses on each pixel, attached to telescopes to measure how light bounces around the sun’s corona before reaching the human eye. The information can help scientists understand the physics of what’s happening in the corona.
“The eclipse is going to go over each one of (the teams) in turn, and they’re all making exactly the same types of observations,” said Amir Caspi, project lead for the Citizen CATE 2024 experiment. “We can then put all of that together.”
Many, though not all, of the stations captured the corona, Caspi said.
Caspi, a solar astrophysicist at the Southwest Research Institute’s Boulder office, was also leading an experiment on one of two
NASA WB-57 planes. The planes departed from El Paso and Ellington Field in Houston and then flew to Mexico to chase the eclipse. Research led by Caspi and others sought to study the sun’s corona and to observe how solar radiation could affect radio waves in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Students with the Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project, which had 18 of its 53 teams in Texas, released helium balloons up to 115,000 feet.
Some of these balloons took temperature, humidity and wind observations to understand how the Earth’s atmosphere reacts to the cold, dark shadow of the eclipse. The information could help scientists better understand climate change, said Angela Des Jardins, principal investigator for the Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project.
Other balloons were used to livestream video from the edge of space and conduct other individually designed experiments.
And at the Fort Worth Zoo, researchers from North Carolina
State University partnered with guests and zookeepers to watch how animals reacted to the darkness.
Adam Hartstone-Rose, a professor of biological sciences at North Carolina State University, hoped their research would inspire children to pursue science careers while eliciting deep questions about what animals experience and contemplate.
“For most of us and certainly all animals, this is a once-in-alifetime event, so understanding it has no functional value,” Hartstone-Rose said. “However, eclipses are amazing — literally inspiring awe and wonder. I think that they encourage people to think about the big questions about the nature of the universe and life. And experiencing something like this collectively, in this one brief moment, is poetic and beautiful.”