Antigo High School students staff, get a glimpse of eclipse

ANTIGO — The weather didn’t cooperate, but many at Antigo High School at least caught a glimpse of Monday’s solar eclipse.

Around 2 p.m., there was something of a festival atmosphere outside the school as students and faculty crowded outside near the faculty parking lot and — wearing specialty eclipse glasses, sharing them, or just peeking without them — looked up.

For a moment when the heavy clouds that covered the Antigo area Monday briefly parted, at least some in attendance did claim to see the moon, or part of it, pass briefly in front of the sun.

“I looked at it — but it was too bright at one point,” said one student. “I just saw part of the moon moving across. Then I saw a little more of it but I kind of hurt my eyes — I shouldn’t have done that.”

One student, Brandi Easton, said she definitely saw something as well.

“It was there for a split few seconds,” she said. “But every time I want to see something that involves space or the stars or something, it always gets cloudy.”

Several teachers had brought students outside to at least get a chance at viewing the rare event, including science teacher Pete Lewandowski.

“Our 9th graders do a unit on the sun and the moon and the universe, so they learned about eclipses earlier in the year,” Lewandowski said. “So this is kind of a neat little event where we said, ‘Hey, if we can see it, we’ll come out and see it.’ We spend a lot of time talking about where the concept of a week comes from, a day comes from, a year comes from and how that’s related to the rotation of objects in the universe. And then we talk about tides, eclipses, those kinds of things. We try to give them a sense of how what’s going on in the universe bigger than us relates to their everyday life.”

The students Lewandowski had shepherded outside were actually not his own, but those he was just taking charge of for the day for Elyse Incha. Another science teacher at Antigo High, Incha actually took vacation to travel to Champaign, Ill., the city where she student taught recently, still owns an apartment, and which — being extremely near the eclipse’s path of totality — afforded her a much better view of the historic event.

“I was looking at the path it was going to follow and I was like, ‘Oh it’s going to pass right next to Champaign.’ I didn’t think too much about it until it got closer to the actual date and thought, ‘It just seems silly to have that apartment and not drive down and watch it.’ So I took a couple days off and drove down. Plus, I was an astronomy and physics major, so I was like, ‘It just feels like I should,’” laughed Incha.

Incha said the unique nature of this eclipse also led her to travel to see it.

“The next one’s not happening until 2044,” she said. “It’s one of those things where I know that there will be another chance to see another solar eclipse in my lifetime, but I want to make sure I catch all the once-in-a-lifetime events when they happen. My students were saying, ‘I feel like every year there’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing happening. I feel like I’ve experienced five already in my lifetime.’ I kind of was laughing with them about that, but it’s true that those don’t seem to matter so much when you’re young and in high school, but as you get older, you start to realize, ‘That is a once in a lifetime thing. That is a chance that I’m only going to get now.’ So I figured I should take it while I’m young enough to make that drive.”

Incha said she spent the eclipse in a dog park with her dog Maple.

“There was only 98 percent coverage here, but it was actually very interesting,” she said. “It was over 70 degrees before the eclipse, but during the eclipse, as it started to cover, it got really chilly. It must have been 10 or 20 degrees that it dropped. The wind picked up. Obviously it got darker — it almost felt like it was evening. It did really kind of feel like this spiritual experience. You start to understand why cultures, when they didn’t know about eclipses, would have thought that this was a god blocking out the sun, because even being in the 98 percent coverage, it did feel like something big was happening.”

Incha plans to discuss the eclipse further with her students when she returns.

“They’ll probably ask, ‘Did it get all dark and what was it like?’ and stuff. But like I said, the kids were also like, ‘Oh, once in a lifetime things? Who cares.’ They’re still kids, so I don’t know that a lot of them will care that much,” she laughed. “But I am excited to talk to my sixth hour class. I know Pete Lewandowski took them outside during the eclipse, so I’m interested to hear about their experience.”