Sky Show 'Sun looked like the moon'
People of all ages and backgrounds gathered Monday afternoon in Diamond Park and along the sidewalks of downtown Butler to view a 79 percent eclipse of the sun.
“I thought it was breathtaking,” said Jeannie Gallagher of Butler, who works in the Morgan Center building and came outside with co-workers to view the sun and moon.
A solar eclipse occurs when the moon, during its new moon phase, passes in front of the sun casting a shadow on part of Earth.
The partial eclipse was visible to most of the contiguous United States, while people within a 70-mile-wide ribbon stretching from Oregon to South Carolina were able to see the totality, or 100 percent eclipse.
With minimal cloud cover in Western Pennsylvania, people had about two-and-a-half hours to see the sun as it progressed through different crescentlike phases.
Some eclipse viewers in Butler used special glasses to safely look at the sun, while other used homemade pinhole cameras to project the sun onto the inside of a cardboard box.
“It's really cool,” said Adam Blose of Center Township, who said he heard about the eclipse on social media.
“I first read about it on a Snapchat story and then I told all my friends about it,” he said.
Gallagher said her husband and two teenage sons left Sunday to drive south to Tennessee where they could witness the total eclipse. With thousands of people flocking to the path of totality, they were too late to book a hotel room, she said.
“They had no plans. Last week they just decided to go,” she said.
Attorney Andrea Boyle brought a pizza to Diamond Park to view the eclipse with her 4-year-old son Silas and some colleagues.
Silas had a pair of eclipse glasses and had been learning about what an eclipse is in his day care, Boyle said.
“The sun looked like the moon,” he said after viewing the shape of the eclipse with his glasses on.Brittany Pierce and daughter Jocelyn of West Sunbury saw the eclipse.“It's something I've never seen before and something I might not get another chance to see again in my life,” Pierce said.Gwilym Price of Butler said he hoped the eclipse would have a universal appeal to people from all walks of life.“I was hoping it would be sort of a cultural celebration. There's so many things wedging us apart in this country. It's nice to have something you can celebrate communally,” he said.Butler resident Bill May said that a solar eclipse was visible above Western Pennsylvania in 1970 when he was a child, but he missed it because his parents feared he would damage his eyesight.“I wasn't allowed to go outside,” he said.He noted that this region will be a short drive from the path of totality during another eclipse in 2024 that will hit eastern Ohio and Erie.
