Hundreds of people turned their eyes to the sky outside the Gustavus Adolphus College Schaefer Arts Center on Monday afternoon, hoping to catch a glimpse of the once in a generation solar eclipse traveling across North America.
While St. Peter isn’t in the path of the total solar eclipse, Minnesotans could potentially see nearly 75% of the sun was obscured by the moon during Gustavus Solar Eclipse Extravaganza, which lasted from 1 to 3 p.m.
Unfortunately, the cloudy skies weren’t cooperating with the festivities. People from ages 8 to 80 searched through the cloud cover in attempt to spot a trace of the eclipse. However, the overcast weather had completely eclipsed any sign of the celestial bodies.
While the view from St. Peter may have been a disappointment, organizers Dr. Darsa Donelan, a Physics professor at Gustavus, and astronomy students Hannah Cisar and Payton Mahady didn’t let the cloudy weather rain on the festivities.
Prepared for the possibility that the eclipse wouldn’t show, Cisar and Mahady planned numerous educational arts and crafts activities that both kids and their fellow classmates could enjoy.
During the early hours of the extravaganza, the Schaefer Arts Center was packed with elementary school age children making eclipse art. Kids took pieces of chalk and traced around a cutout of the moon on top a black slip of paper and then smudged the chalk circle with their hands to mimic the image of solar flares emerging from behind the moon.
In another activity, children broke apart Oreos and lined up the cookie with the cream to create a treat theat resembled a partial eclipse.
The event also featured a live broadcast of the eclipse from other parts of North America so guests could see the total eclipse in all its glory.
“A lot of the kids would hold up their drawings or their cookies to the tv to compare them,” said Cisar.
“And see how close they actually were to what we saw across the country,” added Mahady. “But we’ve had people from ages 3 to a lot of older people who came to learn about the eclipse or say that they’ve never seen it before, so we’ve been able to educate them on what happens duering an eclipse.”
“It’s cool to see how something as simple as a chalk and a piece of paper, or an Oreo cookie can be used to show young children and older adults what an [eclipse] is, because it is a complex process,” added Cisar.
Dr. Darsa assisted with explaining the physics behind the eclipse, using tools like a scale model of the solar system. The model shows that the sun is 400 times larger than the moon, but because it also 400 times further away from the Earth than the moon, they appear to be the same size.
An eclipse can occur twice a year, said Darsa, but there are many different types of eclipses. There’s a partial eclipse where the moon only covers a portion of the sun and the annular eclipse where the moon covers the sun but appears much smaller than it in the sky. A total solar eclipse, where the moon completely obscures the sun, is a much rarer event. The next total eclipse won’t be visible from North America until 2044.
“It’s rare to have two total solar eclipses in the US within 2017 and 2024 that close together, that was pretty cool,” said Darsa. “And the moon is slowly migrating away from earth So in a few hundred years we will never get total solar eclipses. That’s why we have to take advantage now.”
As a member of NASA’s Helophysics Education Activation Team, Darsa was able to receive eclipse glasses and camera solar filters, pamphlets, information cards, stickers and other informational material on the eclipse directly from NASA.
As communications majors, astronomy isn’t the specialty of Cisar nor Mahaday, but the Gustavus students said the project served as a unique opportunity to apply their skillsets in the world of science.
“It was cool to learn about something that seems completely unrelated, but then be a part of something that is connected to what you love doing,” said Mahady. “As communication majors we have nothing to do wiith physics or astronomy, but this way we can still personally connect with it and teach other people about it.”
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