At the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, a large screen beamed live pictures of the sun and the moon. They were captured by a telescope in Spain for this rare solar eclipse, and viewers of all ages were glued to the screen.
"It's a miracle," said one visitor. "I mean, it's not technically a miracle, but it just puts you in touch with the greater creation, or it does for me, put me in touch with the greater creation, the mysteries of it, the links of it. The marvelous story of the universe," said one visitor.
The moon crept further in front of the sun as we watched; the telescope captured fascinating detail on the sun. The museum’s astronomy programs manager, Ila Jade Komasa, explained what we saw
"Our sun's mostly made of hydrogen, so those telescopes are built to filter out all other wavelengths of light, and you're left with just a really specific wavelength of hydrogen. And that allows us to see a lot more of those interesting features on the Sun. So we're looking at all of that surface texture; most of it is granulation, some of it is filaments, kind of the darker regions on the Sun."
At 11.29 a.m. local time, totality was reached. It lasted just 1 minute and 44 seconds, a moment of wonder and connection for all watching.
"To be able to see the picture of the sun here in this kind of detail is kind of unearthed. I've never seen anything like this. It's a monumental event, the eclipse of the Sun, the total eclipse," said one attendee.
Another visitor's father was in Spain watching in person.
"He's traveled down to go and see it, so he's there watching it live, and we're obviously here watching it entirely halfway around the world."
There are only 19 years to wait for Santa Barbara to fall on the path of totality in 2045.
How come the moon is this wonderful, perfect fit across the sun?
I wish I had a phenomenal answer for why this works out," said Komasa. "It is pure coincidence. Our moon and sun, their size and their distance, worked out wonderfully for us to be able to experience it, and the why is a great question that no scientist has an answer for."
And if you’d like to experience more than 104 seconds of darkness, consider taking a trip to Luxor in Egypt in August 2027, where there’s expected to be over six minutes of totality!
