A large crowd of spectators from around the world cheered as darkness overtook Kent State’s Risman Plaza on Monday when the solar eclipse of April 8, 2024, reached totality at 3:14 p.m.
Kent State pre-med student Grace Kamau attended the eclipse party at Risman Plaza with her parents, who had no idea that an eclipse was going to take place in Ohio when they arrived here last week from their home in Kenya.
“When we heard from the news that Ohio was going to be one of the places where there will be total eclipse, we felt very privileged,” said Kamau’s mother, Florence Kamau. “It was quite an amazing experience we’ve never experienced in our lives. I felt like our God is a majestic god, because that [eclipse] cannot be explained. I was privileged to see it happening with my own eyes. It was an amazing thing, unexplainable, and a great joy.”
The eclipse was visible in a 115-mile-wide strip that spanned from Mexico to Canada, crossing the contiguous United States.
A total solar eclipse happens when the entire diameter of the moon covers the sun. During such an event, the massive luminosity of the sun’s atmosphere radiates beyond the outer edges of the moon, revealing the upper reaches of the sun’s atmosphere, the corona. Solar prominences — vast loops of magnetically spun plasma — were also visible at the edges of Monday’s eclipse.
The last time a total solar eclipse happened in Ohio was in 1806, an occurrence that is often labeled Tecumseh’s Eclipse, after the Shawnee chief.
Several campus events were planned for the day, including planetarium shows, a lecture by American Association of Physics Teachers CEO Beth Cunningham, and Wick Poetry Center’s collaborative total eclipse community poem, Shared Sky.
“It is truly a human experience,” Cunningham said. “If you’ve never experienced one, it’s like nothing else you’ve ever observed. It’s kind of our experience of something that happens that’s otherworldly.”
It was a big day for the physics department at Kent State. Instructors, along with five volunteer students, have been working to get Kent State’s planetarium back into action; it had largely been abandoned since the pandemic. Monday’s shows were the largest since pre-Covid years.
“It had gone sort of dormant during Covid, which was sad,” said Associate Professor of Physics Robert “Bo” Polak. “So, when Covid was over, people weren’t really using it, so one of the things I wanted to do was bring it back up and running.”
The planetarium is an introduction to the night sky, and a place where people can learn about constellations and recent scientific developments pertaining to astronomy. Polak hopes the planetarium will “inspire people to go outside and look at the night sky” and at least know where to find the North Star, the Big Dipper and Betelgeuse.
Seeing Monday’s solar eclipse was a first for Polak.
“I was surprised it didn’t get darker,” Polak said, “but we could see a couple of the planets. I was kind of hoping we could see Mercury, but I’m pretty sure that was Jupiter. You could see Venus. I think maybe if it wasn’t cloudy, we might have been able to see other planets. I’m glad we had good enough weather for it. It could have been slightly better, but I thought this morning we weren’t going to see anything, so I think we’ve done pretty well.”
The next total solar eclipse in the United States will happen in 2044; the next one in Ohio won’t be until 2099.
