CARBONDALE — A few beads of sunlight slipped past the rugged surface of the moon, and then southern Illinois plunged into darkness.
A collective, excited gasp rippled through the crowd as people stood agape with their heads tilted back.
A ring of blinding white light from the giant fireball delineated the moon’s shadow, and the horizon took on a yellow-orange glow just before the moon completely blocked the sun.
“That’s so, so cool,” said Lynn Harden, who was lounging on one of two beach chairs she and her husband, Gary, brought from Mount Sterling, a small village in southwest Wisconsin. They were looking up from a grassy expanse overlooking a vast, tranquil lake in the 43,000-acre Crab Orchard National Wildlife Refuge near Carbondale.
To the sun and moon’s lower right, Venus, and to the top left, Jupiter, shared in a bit of the spotlight with rare daytime appearances. Viewers later noted that insects, which had been chirping all day by the lakeside, grew louder when the sky turned dark.
In just over four minutes, the main show was over, and with hoots and hollers, over a hundred onlookers offered a standing ovation for the last total solar eclipse the contiguous United States will see for the next two decades.
The Hardens had decided to drive from Wisconsin for this eclipse after their first “magical” experience in 2017 seeing one in Jay Em, a city in Wyoming. Now retired, they said, they are happy to drive over eight hours just to experience minutes of totality.
“The first time I ever saw it, I was like, I know why a lot of people chase them,” Lynn Harden said. The couple joked they didn’t know whether they’d live long enough to witness the 2044 eclipse. But, they said, they would be willing to travel farther to make it happen sooner. When they heard Earth would see another total solar eclipse move from the Arctic to Spain in 2026, they looked at each other. The gears were turning.
A few feet away, a Georgia family — now also eclipse chasers — celebrated the unobstructed viewing by saying “cheers” with Oreo space dunk cookies.
Ashley King and William Faulkner had been out at the lake since early-morning dew coated the grass. In 2017, an errant cloud disrupted their viewing. This time, they were on a mission.
On Sunday, the couple had driven from Atlanta to Louisville, Kentucky, where they would be close enough to the path of totality to check the latest weather forecasts and decide the best viewing location Monday morning. They decided to join her parents at Crab Orchard Lake.
King had been following cloud cover predictions at different places she had pinned on Google Maps along the moon’s path, which included southern Illinois. In a global rarity, it was the second time in seven years a total solar eclipse occurred over this portion of the state and some parts of Missouri and Kentucky.
“I would’ve gone wherever because, it’s like, we’re already getting this far,” she said.
Less than 20 minutes after totality ended, only a few people besides the Hardens and Kings remained at the viewing site on Crab Orchard Lake. The moon still had just under an hour to finish its trip across the sun’s disk, but the brightness of the star made the lunar shadow almost unnoticeable except through solar viewing glasses.
By all appearances, business as usual had resumed in Carbondale by 3:30 p.m. The intensity of the sun, moments earlier a welcome factor for impeccable eclipse viewing, turned the afternoon into an unseasonably and uncomfortably hot spring day from which many sought respite. As kayaks returned to the boat ramp, some people packed up their picnic blankets, and cars zipped away from the site.
Debbie Davis and her grandson, Reese Davis, stayed at the lake for a while longer. Coming from Champaign, the grandmother had let the high school senior skip Monday classes and drive downstate for the cosmic event.
At first, they were headed to a ranch in Nashville, Illinois, hoping to also listen to and notice the behavior of different animals during the eclipse. But they pivoted toward Carbondale when they saw forecasts for the cloud cover. And it paid off, from the starstruck smiles on their faces.
“The ‘Oohs’ and ‘Aahs’ before and the applause after were just perfect,” Debbie Davis said.
In Chicago, a moment shared
In Chicago, which was not in the path of totality, hundreds of people took a break from their day just before 2 p.m. to gather along the lakefront near Belmont Harbor on the North Side. The moon covered 94% of the sun at the peak of the eclipse.
One group brought a homemade pinhole projector made out of a cereal box. Others shared their solar glasses with strangers who didn’t come quite as prepared.
Outside the Adler Planetarium, Annemarie Catania sat with a crowd of thousands assembled along the building’s perimeter, watching the moon move in front of the sun. She said when she found out her daughter’s school was planning to travel to the planetarium to see the solar eclipse, she immediately signed up to be a chaperone.
“In 2017, I went outside and tried to see it with a colander,” Catania said. “It didn’t work. But now, looking at it straight on and seeing it so clearly with the glasses, it’s mesmerizing.”
Catania’s daughter was one of many students across Chicago who ventured out of their classrooms Monday to see the phenomenon. Just south of Museum Campus, more than 1,000 Chicago Public Schools students crowded the rotunda at the Museum of Science and Industry, building rockets, learning to use telescopes and attempting to draw the sun’s outermost layer.
About 5,000 visitors were expected to gather to watch the solar eclipse on site, participating in an official viewing in its courtyard and in other activities inside.
As the eclipse neared its largest point of coverage from the area, cheers erupted around the planetarium as the sky grew darker and the temperature dropped slightly. After the sun came back out, Beebe Roh said the experience was even better than she had hoped.
“How can you beat this weather, this city, seeing all of this with the planetarium behind us?” Roh asked. “After seeing it, I want to know everything about the science behind it. It’s a wonderful teaching moment for my kids, but for me as well.”
Carmen Mahon, curator of STEM at Chicago Public Schools, said an eclipse is the perfect opportunity to help students get excited and involved with science at an early age.
“I want them to take it all in,” Mahon said. “Remember that you’re a human, experience is learning and what we’re seeing can inspire pure joy.”
CPS partnered with the Museum of Science and Industry to introduce activities to help the young kids learn about the eclipse. Mahon said making them feel comfortable in the Hyde Park museum was one of her biggest goals for the day.
“I grew up on the South Side, and I didn’t feel a part of the museum growing up,” Mahon said. “Someone told me, ‘This is your museum, this is your South Side.’ And I thought, ‘What if I could make sure all of the kids felt like that?’ This is where science happens and this is your museum.”
The museum also set up several pop-up viewing locations around the city for Chicago residents who could not make it to the museum or might not be able to pay the admission fee. Representatives were at Millennium Park, the Michigan Avenue Bridge, Oak Street Beach and the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center with eclipse glasses and telescopes. Kate Higbee, senior director of business development at the museum, said accessibility was a priority for the museum in organizing their coverage.
“One of the great things about an eclipse is that it’s a community experience,” Higbee said. “You stand with a bunch of other people, whether it’s your friends or your students, and you watch it happen together. I think everyone should have that.”
Voula Saridakis, a curator at the Museum of Science and Industry and a NASA Solar System ambassador, said she hopes everyone who sees the eclipse leaves with an increased appreciation for the wonder of space, science and the universe.
“These are the most spectacular events to witness, and it’s a rarity,” Saridakis said. “It’s a rare event, it’s a beautiful event and I hope that everybody young and old gains that appreciation for the beauty of the universe and the heavens, and hopefully learns something new about science.”
Across the Midwest
Driving four hours from Chicago’s Lincoln Square neighborhood, Justin Carrino and his 11-year-old daughter went to witness the astronomical event inside the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, which also fell in the path of totality.
Tens of thousands of people crowded the racetrack Monday, donning eclipse glasses as they waited for the moon to creep across the sun.
“It takes over an hour for the moon to go across, so I think there’s a lot of ‘Hurry up and wait,’ but we’re both really excited for when it gets a little bit further across,” Carrino, 48, said.
The daylong event kicked off with racecars speeding along the track. Informational NASA and Purdue University tents were stationed across the campus, along with food trucks and other vendors.
With the crowds, the speedway was particularly noisy, Carrino said, but the pair were still thrilled to witness the historic event.
“My daughter learned in school, if you’re able to get some totality, the environment changes, color changes, the way animals behave changes, all that sort of thing,” Carrino said. “Given that it was so close, and that it was fairly easy for us to do, it was worth it.”
In Cleveland, also in the path of totality, the Guardians were hosting the Chicago White Sox after the eclipse.
Chicago White Sox and Cleveland Guardians take in total solar eclipse from a special vantage point
Sox reliever Bryan Shaw, who was with Cleveland in 2017 when there was a partial eclipse there, told the Tribune: “It was a few years ago when we had another eclipse, obviously not as good as this one. We were in town for that one. Today is one of the more unique places I’ve had a game at like this.”
A game-time decision
At Crab Orchard refuge a few hours before the eclipse, King’s parents, George and Stephanie King, had joined the couple with a picnic blanket, a pop-up canopy and their tiny 16-year-old dog, Bailey, a Shih Tzu and poodle crossbreed.
In 2017, George and Stephanie King watched the total eclipse on a beach by the Chattooga River between Georgia and South Carolina.
Despite cloudy forecasts, they got lucky when the sky cleared as the moon completely covered the sun and enveloped them in darkness.
“We didn’t know, really, what to expect. But we went because it was close to home so it wasn’t that big of a deal to go,” George King said. “And we just thought it was one of the neatest things we’d ever seen.”
He remembered the fascinating and eerie sight of shadow bands being cast on the sand — thin dark ripples waving over the ground. His wife said insects started chirping as soon as the sky went dark but went silent again when the sun peeked out from behind the sun.
Because Faulkner and Ashley King missed totality in 2017, they made a game-time decision to join her parents in Carbondale, where forecasts tentatively promised them mostly clear skies.
“In Dad we trust,” Ashley King laughed. “Because, I gotta say, last time was pretty rough.”
Chicago Tribune’s LaMond Pope contributed.
