Space put together quite the show Monday, April 8. As the moon danced across the sun, it dimmed the sun’s brilliance and cast a captivating shadow over the audience — at least that was the expectation.
Regrettably, the eclipse found itself upstaged by gloomy weather. Despite the students’ eager anticipation for the phenomenon of a total eclipse — where the moon moves directly between the sun and Earth, entirely obscuring the sun’s face — they soon realized that rain and clouds were likely to interrupt the spectacle.
The eclipse began at 1:49 p.m. for Knoxville and hit its highest coverage of 89% at approximately 3:07 p.m. Students gathered around the Hill to view the eclipse, overtaking the roof of the physics building and stopping at the lawn outside of Ayres Hall. Despite the gray skies, some people held optimism for the eclipse, like Nevin Bulut, a UT English graduate student.
“I’m super excited about it,” Bulut said. “I have been waiting for it to happen since the last one, so I’ve been very pumped.”
The last total solar eclipse Tennessee saw was on Aug. 21, 2017, when the weather did not spoil the event.
As some students initially looked up at the sky with hope, they began to turn to technology and talking as a better source of entertainment.
“I was definitely a little disappointed,” Dominic Vecina, a freshman majoring in kinesiology said. “It’s really, really cloudy in Knoxville today, just a very dreary, cloudy, kind of gloomy day, so you couldn’t really see the sky very much. Especially when I saw the eclipse in 2017, and I was in the path of totality in 2017, and it was a very clear day, thankfully. … It was just kind of a letdown this time because you could really see the sun and the moon for like a couple seconds at best.”
Despite the disappointing weather conditions for viewers in Knoxville, this year’s eclipse path included an estimated 31.6 million people, a significant increase from the 12 million in 2017.
This year’s path of totality stretched from Mexico to Canada, while the 2017 eclipse crossed from Oregon to South Carolina. In addition, this year, the moon was closer to the Earth, which made for a larger shadow, darker sky and elongated eclipse. However, these details were less noticeable to Knoxvillians because of the cloudy weather.
“I was a little bit disappointed with how the eclipse actually happened because one of my best friends, she goes to school at the University of Texas, and they’re in the path of totality this time, and it’s a very sunny day for them,” Vecina said. “They had a great time just watching the eclipse, whereas like on our campus you couldn’t even see the eclipse at all because of the clouds.”
It appears that the other UT had better luck in the eclipse lottery this time around.
However, in the few moments that clouds did not obscure the eclipse, viewers marveled at the celestial event.
Viewers were able to witness a subtle dimming of the environment and a shimmering crescent of light surrounding the moon. Isabel Williams, a junior studying nursing, joined the crowd to view the eclipse.
“I enjoyed getting to see the crescent shape,” Williams said, “It was really cool. I’ve never experienced that.”
As observers eagerly await the next solar eclipse visible from the contiguous U.S., slated for Aug. 23, 2044, memories of the April 8 eclipse in Knoxville serve as a reminder of nature’s unpredictability and the undeniable allure of cosmic phenomena.
