Ohioans travel to Kentucky to view total eclipse
DAWSON SPRINGS, Ky. — Monday’s eclipse unfolded exactly as expected.
Cicadas stopped chirping. The air cooled to 25 degrees Fahrenheit below the day’s high temperature. The sun compressed into a gaseous, silvery halo. Most predictable of all, night spilled over the afternoon like someone dimmed the light in the sky.
Those lucky enough to witness the total eclipse found themselves in shock and awe for its entirety.
“I’ve never seen anything like that in my life,” said Jeremy Funk of Knox County, who traveled to Kentucky as part of a NASA livestream of the event.
Like many other Americans eager to catch the first coast-to-coast solar eclipse to sweep the continental U.S. in 99 years, Ohioans flocked to places like Kentucky and Tennessee where they could witness it in totality.
“It’s such a unique thing. For it to happen someplace you can see it is once-in-alifetime,” said Elliott Cecil, a retired middle school life-science teacher from Sunbury. “I planned on it being spectacular.”
An estimated 500 million people across the U.S., Canada and Mexico watched Monday’s eclipse, which was partially visible in every state. In Columbus, the eclipse peaked around 2:30 p.m., when the moon blocked 86.3 percent of the sun, although clouds often obscured it.
With most Americans living within a day’s drive of totality, many headed to the nearest spot on the path’s 70-milewide arc from Oregon in the Northwest to South Carolina in the Southeast.
Gary Pagana of Chagrin Falls spent eight or nine hours over the course of a weekend driving to Pennyrile Forest State Resort Park in Dawson Springs to watch the solar eclipse.
Constance Brown traveled to the park from the Sandusky area with her husband, Robin, who works for NASA’s Plum Brook Station. He might be a certified “space geek,” she said, but as an earthling she had a vested interest in making the trip, too.
“No matter how science-y you are, you’re going to stop and watch it,” Brown said. “You’re going to know about it.”
Nearby, about a hundred Knox County K-12 students and their parents milled around the 10th hole of Pennyrile’s golf course.
About an hour before the eclipse, they released a gigantic egg-shaped space balloon outfitted with video equipment. Footage from their balloon taken 80,000 feet up was supposed to join a NASA-sponsored livestream of the eclipse. (Unfortunately, they would later discover that technical issues stymied that mission.)
Around 1:20 p.m., when the moon swallowed the sun whole, Knox County parents and children alike shared in child-like glee.
They whooped as stars emerged midafternoon — a sudden visual reminder that from their Kentucky location, outer space was much, much closer than Ohio was.
Luckily, Ohioans who missed out on Monday’s celestial showcase will be in good position in less than seven years for another totaleclipse sighting. On April 8, 2024, an eclipse is expected to slide on a diagonal the opposite way from Mexico to Maine — grazing Columbus and passing right over Cleveland.
“It’s amazing to see something people oohed and aahed about for 50,000 years,” said Todd Thompson, an Ohio State University astrophysicist who, along with his family, joined the Knox County group. “I imagine people thousands of years ago looking up had a similar experience.”