College town gets ready for its moment under no sun
Thousands of people ready to descend on city to witness ‘celestial Super Bowl’
CARBONDALE, Ill. — During football season, a maroon mob gathers in Saluki Stadium as thousands of Southern Illinois University fans come to cheer their hometown heroes. On Aug. 21, nearly three weeks before the first game, crowds will again pack the stadium. But all eyes will be on the sky, not the field.
By some cosmic serendipity, this college town will be among the best places to witness the Great American Eclipse as it whisks across the contiguous United States, the first total solar eclipse to do so since 1918.
The moon will block the sun and plunge everything here into an eerie darkness for more than 2 1/2 minutes. The temperature will dip. Birds will hush. And a dazzling, pearly white halo will emerge, demanding everyone’s attention.
Carbondale, population 26,000, will be host to tens of thousands of visiting skygazers. Padma Yanamandra-fisher, a senior research scientist with the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo, will be among them, studying the solar spectacle.
During a visit in May, she stood near the football field’s 10-yard line and looked up at the cloudless plot of blue above the bleachers where she plans to point her telescope.
“I feel like I’ll be lost observing and then forget to take the data,” she said. “It’s supposed to be such an emotional experience that part of you has to be in check enough to say: ‘Don’t think about it now. Do the work, do the work, do the work.’”
Yanamandra-fisher will join other scientists here hoping to glean from the eclipse tantalizing insight into the sun’s mysteries.
As the eclipse nears, Carbondale is hard at work preparing for them and the tens of thousands more expected for a celestial Super Bowl.
‘This isn’t a choice’
Three years ago, Bob Baer, a staff member at the university’s physics department, learned of Carbondale’s cosmic destiny: The city is near what NASA calls “the point of greatest duration.”
It will experience “totality” — when the moon completely overshadows the sun — for longer than almost anywhere else: a majestic 2 minutes 38 seconds. That alone would propel any town to nerd stardom, but Carbondale is exceptional. It also lies within the line of totality for America’s next total solar eclipse, on April 8, 2024.
Baer has played a central role in preparing the university for its moment under no sun. “My main pitch was, ‘This isn’t a choice,’” he said. “We’ve got a dot on a map and a crossroads on a map, so everybody’s looking at us. They’re going to come here no matter what.”
Coordinating public outreach for one of the most popular astronomical events of the century would be a major undertaking for any university. But for one without an astronomy department, it appeared particularly daunting.
So Baer and his colleagues teamed with NASA, the Adler