Thousands Gather At WVU To View Eclipse

Across the country, people took a moment out of their day on Monday to watch the solar eclipse.

West Virginia was no exception. The greens of the Mountainlair, West Virginia University’s student union, were completely covered by students and community members watching the sky.

Students like senior Claire Dursa made up the majority of the crowd. She works at the student union, and took advantage of her proximity to the event to come outside and see what was happening.

“If I’m correct with what I heard, I think the next one’s quite a few many years away,” Dursa said. “I think we’re going to enjoy this one as much as we can because you know that we won’t get to have this kind of experience for quite a long time.”

Jackson Taylor is a physics Ph.D. student at West Virginia University, and a graduate student assistant at the university’s planetarium. He said seeing the general public excited about astronomy makes the experience all the better.

“It’s great today, just the opportunity to reach so many people,” Taylor said “So many people are excited about astronomy. This is like astronomy day, it almost feels like. People are asking great questions. People are just having a great time.”

Taylor estimated more than a thousand people came to the Mountainlair, based on how many eclipse glasses were handed out.

“We gave out solar eclipse glasses, we gave out about 1100 to 1200 of them,” he said. “We ran out promptly, because there’s a lot of people here.” 

Taylor and others from the astronomy department set up solar telescopes looking at the sun, with special filters including a corona telescope, which lets viewers look at the sun through clouds. They also provided historical information about previous eclipses, including their scientific and societal importance through millennia of human observation. 

Not everyone got a pair of eclipse glasses, but many were quick to share with friends and even strangers. Others like Zach Tallman took things into their own hands. 

“I didn’t decide I was gonna watch the solar eclipse until this morning,” he said. “I was like nobody, nowhere is gonna have filters or glasses. I might as well just make something out of what I got here at my house.”

He made a pinhole projector using instructions from NASA and common household objects like a cereal box, aluminum foil and printer paper.

As the eclipse progressed, changes started to manifest even to the naked eye. 

“You can definitely tell just looking out it’s definitely a lot dimmer,” Tallman said.

Close to the peak of the eclipse, a cloud started to make its way across the sun. For a moment, some in the crowd believed it to be totality, a complete covering of the sun that did not occur anywhere in West Virginia.

The cloud briefly allowed even those without eclipse glasses to see the crescent of the sun, filtered through the water vapor miles above.

“I’m seeing just a little tiny sliver of the sun, the rest of it is black,” said Jane Connor, who traveled up from Clarksburg. She knew an eclipse like this won’t happen until at least 2045, and that time far from West Virginia.

“It doesn’t happen very often,” Connor said. “So my daughter and granddaughter and I came up here today to experience it with a lot of people. It’s really exciting.”