‘I know why people chase them’: Solar eclipse lives up to its hype in Illinois

CARBONDALE, Ill. — A few beads of sunlight slipped past the rugged surface of the moon, and then southern Illinois plunged into darkness.

A collective, excited gasp rippled through the crowd as people stood agape with their heads tilted back.

A ring of bright light from the giant fireball delineated the moon’s shadow, and the horizon took on a yellow glow.

“That’s so, so cool,” said Lynn Harden, who was lounging on one of two beach chairs she and her husband, Gary, brought from Mount Sterling, a small village in southwest Wisconsin.

To the lower right, Venus, and to the top left, Jupiter, shared in a bit of the spotlight with rare daytime appearances.

In just over four minutes, the main show was over, and onlookers at Crab Orchard Lake offered a standing ovation with hoots and hollers.

The Hardens decided to drive from Wisconsin for this eclipse after their first “magical” experience in 2017 seeing one in Jay Em, a city in Wyoming. Now retired, they said, they are happy to drive over eight hours just to experience minutes of totality.

“I know why people chase them,” Lynn Harden said.

A few feet away, a Georgia family — now also eclipse chasers — celebrated the unobstructed viewing by saying “cheers” with Oreo space dunk cookies.

Ashley King and William Faulkner, from Atlanta, had been out at the lake since early-morning dew coated the grass.

Faulkner set up a small telescope with a homemade filter to try to capture some images of the eclipse.

On Sunday night, King and Faulkner had driven to Louisville, Kentucky, where they would be close enough to the path of totality to check the latest weather forecasts and decide the best viewing location Monday morning. They decided to join her parents at Crab Orchard Lake.

King had been following cloud cover predictions at different places she had pinned on Google Maps along the path of totality. “I would’ve gone wherever because it’s like, we’re already getting this far,” she said.

The lake was one of seven eclipse viewing locations on the 43,000-acre Crab Orchard National Wildlife Refuge near Carbondale.

In a global rarity, southern Illinois was in the path of totality, where the moon completely blocks the sun, for the second time in seven years. The contiguous United States won’t see another total eclipse until 2044.

In Chicago, which was not in the path of totality, hundreds of people took a break from their day just before 2 p.m. to gather along the lakefront near Belmont Harbor on the North Side. The moon covered 94% of the sun at the peak of the eclipse.

One group brought a homemade pinhole projector made out of a cereal box. Others shared their solar glasses with strangers who didn’t come quite as prepared.

Justin Carrino and his 11-year-old daughter drove four hours from the Lincoln Square neighborhood in Chicago to witness the astronomical event inside the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, which also fell in the path of totality.

Tens of thousands of people crowded the racetrack Monday, donning eclipse glasses as they waited for the moon to creep across the sun.

“It takes over an hour for the moon to go across, so I think there’s a lot of ‘Hurry up and wait,’ but we’re both really excited for when it gets a little bit further across,” Carrino, 48, said.

The daylong event kicked off with race cars speeding along the track. Informational NASA and Purdue University tents were stationed across the campus, along with food trucks and other vendors.

With the crowds, the speedway was particularly noisy, Carrino said, but the pair were still thrilled to witness the historic event.

“My daughter learned in school, if you’re able to get some totality, the environment changes, color changes, the way animals behave changes, all that sort of thing,” Carrino said. “Given that it was so close, and that it was fairly easy for us to do, it was worth it.”

In Cleveland, also in the path of totality, the Guardians were hosting the Chicago White Sox. The game was scheduled to begin after the eclipse.

Sox reliever Bryan Shaw, who was with Cleveland in 2017 when there was a partial eclipse, told the Tribune: “It was a few years ago when we had another eclipse, obviously not as good as this one. We were in town for that one. Today is one of the more unique places I’ve had a game at like this.”

Sox manager Pedro Grifol said he wasn’t going to watch the eclipse. “It doesn’t interest me that much. I’ll watch videos of it to see what it looks like.”

Back at Crab Orchard refuge ahead of the eclipse, King’s parents, George and Stephanie King, joined the couple with a picnic blanket, a pop-up canopy and their tiny 16-year-old dog, Bailey, a Shih Tzu and poodle crossbreed.

In 2017, George and Stephanie King watched the total eclipse on a beach by the Chattooga River between Georgia and South Carolina.

Despite cloudy forecasts, they got lucky when the sky cleared as the moon completely covered the sun and enveloped them in darkness. “We didn’t know, really, what to expect. But we went because it was close to home so it wasn’t that big of a deal to go,” George King said. “And we just thought it was one of the neatest things we’d ever seen.”

George King remembered the fascinating and eerie sight of shadow bands being cast on the sand — thin dark ripples waving over the ground. His wife said insects started chirping as soon as the sky went dark, but they went silent again when the sun peeked out from behind the sun.

Ashley King and Faulkner had gone elsewhere in 2017 and missed totality when a cloud blocked the view at the last minute. So this time, they made a game-time decision to join King’s parents.

“In Dad we trust,” Ashley King laughed. “Because, I gotta say, last time was pretty rough.”

____

(Chicago Tribune’s LaMond Pope contributed.)

____