Columbus High eclipse witness: It was eerie, spectacular, beautiful

Eerie, spectacular and just beautiful.

That was the way Columbus High School science and physics teacher Laura Solomons described witnessing a total eclipse of the sun by the moon Monday on a personal road trip to east Tennessee.

“Everybody started hugging each other, and just jumping up and down,” she said shortly after the eclipse’s 2:31 p.m. peak in Athens, Tenn. “My kids were clapping and they were so happy and cheering. It was just a big wave of emotion that came over everybody. We met some people who had driven down from New Jersey and it took them 15 hours to get there. He and his wife were both crying, they were so happy about it.”

Solomons and Amanda Hefner, a Columbus High biology teacher, both hit the road over the weekend with their families to capture the special solar event, arriving in Chattanooga, Tenn., a city that was to reach an eclipse of about 99 percent. But they decided to push on Monday morning to Athens, about an hour farther north, where 100-percent totality would occur.

It was worth it, said Solomons, explaining her group headed for a city park where thousands were gathering for what was dubbed the “Great American Eclipse” in the weeks leading up to it. That’s because the natural event started in Oregon and then moved over the Rocky Mountains through the Midwest and, finally, into the Southeast through Tennessee, which included a tiny bit of northeast Georgia and a swath of South Carolina.

“I didn’t think it was going to be as amazing and moving as it was,” said Solomons, who took a personal day for the road trip with Hefner and her family. When they got to the Athens park, they found people selling protective glasses to view the sun and giving away food. As the big moment drew closer, the festival-like raucous atmosphere transitioned quickly to a moment of awe for the crowd.

“You could hear people cheering everywhere, then everybody just kind of stopped and went, ‘Ooohhhh,’” she said. “Then you could hear the cicadas and the crickets chirping. My children started running around, and we all took our glasses off and stared at the totality.”

The eclipse gazers could see the chromosphere, the reddish gaseous layer of the sun, Solomons said. They viewed the “Bailey’s beads,” the little “diamonds” of light that appear around the outlet of the moon’s rugged terrain against the sun. Then came the solar prominence, which are the bands of bright gaseous features that form off the sun and can be seen around the moon’s edge during the eclipse. The North Star even made an appearance, and the air temperatures around the crowds cooled because of the sun’s lack of presence.

“Goosebumps came over me,” Solomons said of the emotions pulsing through her and others. “And then my son came up to me and gave me the biggest hug in the middle of it all and said, ‘Thank you so much for doing this.’”

Finally, after capturing the peak of the heavily hyped total solar eclipse, the thousands of people at the Athens park began heading for their cars for journeys home near and far. The cosmic festival on a late summer day was over.

“I’m definitely going to do this again, because it was just amazing,” Solomons said. “It was worth every moment.”

She will have her opportunity, with the next total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024, moving across Central America before slicing across the United States. That one will have a totality zone that will venture out of Mexico across portions of Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, before heading across extreme eastern Canada and Newfoundland.

This story was originally published August 21, 2017 at 5:31 PM with the headline "Columbus High eclipse witness: It was eerie, spectacular, beautiful."