OSU campus, Kinney field, College of Wooster draw crowds to to watch solar eclipse
A few minutes of darkness in the middle of the day drew hundreds of visitors to The Ohio State University College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (CFAES), Monday to celebrate the total eclipse of the sun.
A map of the world set up at the welcome gave area visitors an opportunity to pin where they were from, and there were guests from as far away as South Korea, India and other countries in Europe as well as visitors from across the United States.
Terry and Judy Lanning of Jenison, Michigan, did not feel out of place on the OSU Wooster campus to experience the event, sitting proudly in their University of Michigan chairs.
"Ohhh this was amazing," Judy Lanning said. "We were in Carbondale (Illinois) seven years ago, and just before totality, a single cloud came in so we didn't see it. A lady sitting next to us said, 'God must not have wanted us to see it today,' and that's the first thing that came to my mind as well."
"I think God is in control. He controls everything in the universe," Terry Lanning said.
Enjoying the eclipse at Kinney fields
Dozens of people sat in groups on blankets or lawn chairs spread out across Kinney fields. South of the Wayne County Children’s Services building some played frisbee and lacrosse as they awaited totality. Others lay on the grass and looked up through glasses.
Anticipation built as the air turned hazy and the temperature dropped. Then, right at 3:16 p.m. the last sliver of orange sun disappeared from the glasses and the sky took on the colors of dusk with and orange and yellow glow visible just above the rooftops on Highland Avenue.
A combined gasp and cheer arose from those spread across the field. One group clapped. In the distance fireworks sounded and cars honked their horns. People took off their glasses and marveled at the blue-white corona around the moon. The parking lot lights behind the Childrens Services building turned on, their sensors having been tripped by the sudden darkness.
The traffic had diminished on Highland Avenue and Burbank Road, and during the two or three minutes of totality, it seemed the world stood still, as people tried to take photos of the corona on their phones.
Then, just as suddenly as it started, a ray of sun burst from behind the moon, and the odd grey light of the partial eclipse returned.
“It was pretty cool,” Rowan Spurlock, a fifth grader at Triway, said as the sun returned. “Breathtaking,” added Alexandra Sansom, an Edgewood seventh grader.
The Spurlock and Sansom families watched the eclipse together from Kinney Fields.
The kids couldn’t remember the 2017 partial solar eclipse very well, but the adults said it couldn’t compare.
“This was a totally different experience,” said Carrie Sansom, a 49-year-old librarian at Parkview Elementary School.
“It was like night and day,” Keely Spurlock, a 46-year-old real estate agent, chimed in.
“I remember thinking the [2017] partial eclipse was close enough, and we don’t need to travel, but now it’s like, it’s not the same,” the elder Sansom said.
Across the field, Kevin Kamins, 65, and Kimberly Gray Kamins, 58, sat still gazing through their glasses as the moon receded.
They are from the Raleigh Durham area of North Carolina and had been at a wedding in Pittsburgh over Easter. They decided to stick around for the eclipse.
Every day they were checking cloud cover forecasts to decide where exactly they would go, Gray Kamins said. They were leaning toward the Akron area until late.
Early Monday morning Kamins got up to check the weather one again. “He said ‘We’re going toward Wooster,’” Gray Kamins recounted.
They thought about stopping in East Palestine, but Kamins said he spent a year of college at the College of Wooster so they got off the interstate to avoid traffic and took backroads to Wooster.
“My wife would panic as it looked like it would get cloudier, but I assured her it was going to get clearer,” Kamins said.
In the end, their bet on Wooster paid off. They saw a 93 percent eclipse in 2017 from North Carolina, but totality was something else.
“For me, it’s that instant you can kinda take the glasses off and you’re seeing with your own eyes and it’s amazing,” he said.
A great learning experience
"This was definitely a great experience, something that won't happen again for awhile," said Zach Payne, a student at Stark State College in Canton, who was at the OSU campus location. "This was totally unexpected as opposed to what I heard from media."
Kip Gardner, a science professor at Stark State, invited several of his students to take the hourlong trip from North Canton to Wooster.
"It was quite an experience for kids. This was my third eclipse," Gardner said. "It was worth coming out and seeing it again. For most people it's a once in a lifetime things, but I've been lucky enough to experience three."
He was living in Virginia in 1970 and it went right over his house. He watched it from his yard.
"Then in 2017, I took my daughter down to Tennessee to see that one," he said. "To come here to Wooster, it was worth the hour's drive from home to see it. It's always an amazing sight."
One difference Gardner pointed out between the eclipse he saw Monday and the one he saw in Virginia, he remembered how the birds stopped chirping because they thought it was night in the woods.
"When the sun came back out, they started singing again," he said. "That didn't happen here. There weren't many birds here today."
Jeanette Turner of Wheeling, West Virginia, hoped to use the eclipse experience as a learning opportunity for her inquisitive 6-year-old Noah.
"He's always asking good questions," Turner said. "My husband and I often wonder what he's going to say next. He has a rare sense of humor for a kid his age."
Noah asked his mom why people came from so far away to see it get dark when it happens every night when he goes to bed. She tried to explain the rareness of an eclipse to him.
He was fascinated when he looked at the sun through his eclipse glasses.
A big fan of astrology
Rosemary Willow of Charlottesville, Virginia, said she and her friend made the trip to Wooster because of the video she saw on YouTube explaining how to correctly pronounce Wooster.
"I'm a big fan of astrology, and anything to do with the solar system," Willow said. "An eclipse of this magnitude, where the sun is so close to the earth, this is an historic event. I'll be dead when the next one happens in 44 years.
"It (Wooster) looked like a pretty cool place," she added. "It's close to Amish Country, and we were able to make a stop in Berlin on our way here. I thought this would be a great place, but I didn't know it was going to be this fantastic."
John Saylor of Mineral City, Ohio, joined his son-in-law, Josh Compton of Dover, for the experience.
"This is the most awesome thing I've seen in my life," Saylor said. "I live an hour down the road. I can't live this close to totality and not be here. I'll probably never see anything like this again, although my buddy in Florida did invite me to come the eclipse in 44 years. I'll only be 88 then, so why not.
"I thought it would be darker," he added. "Maybe it was darker closer to the center line."
"I've never seen anything like this," Compton added. "It was great to experience something like this; something you don't see every day."
Greg Cawley of Pittsburgh used the opportunity to get together with his brother from the Arlington, VA area and savor the once-in-a-lifetime experience.
"The people who organized this event today did an awesome job, with so many things for visitors to see and do," Cawley said.
Associate Dean and Campus Director Andy Michel was grateful for such a great day weather-wise and truly appreciated all the support from the visitors to the campus on Monday.
At the College of Wooster
By 2:30 p.m., hundreds of students, professors and staff were sitting and standing on the south quad in front of the College of Wooster’s iconic Kauke Hall, peering at the sun through their eclipse glasses.
The college’s astronomy club had been planning the gathering for six months under the supervisor of Laura DeGroot, a physics professor.
That Wooster is in the path of totality is exceedingly rare, DeGroot said as she watched students use a sun spotter set up on a table on the quad. They only happen about twice a year anywhere on earth because the moon’s orbit is on a 5 degree incline, the physicist explained.
Not only are they rare and cool to look at, throughout history they’ve provided great opportunities for scientists, DeGroot said, pointing to the 1919 eclipse expedition led by British physicist Arthur Eddington.
Einstein’s theory of general relativity, published just a few years earlier, predicted that massive objects, like the sun, would bend light around them, and that’s exactly what Eddington observed during the 1919 eclipse, DeGroot said.
“It provided great evidence for general relativity,” she said. The expedition may have included Wooster’s own Arthur Compton, a College of Wooster alum and physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics 1927, DeGroot said.
The students who lined up to take a gander through Megan Nieberding’s telescope on the other end of the quad probably didn’t make any observations that will lead to a Nobel, they were learning a lot.
“Have you ever looked through a telescope before,” Nieberding, a visiting physics professor, asked one student.
“Not one like this,” he said before peering through the viewfinder of Nieberding’s high-powered Celestron Nexstar 8SE telescope.
“Can you see the sunspots?” Nieberding asked.
“What are those?” the student replied.
“They’re slightly cooler areas of the sun’s surface,” she told him.
He confirmed that he could indeed see the darker, cooler regions of the sun, which would be invisible to those only wearing eclipse glasses, through the telescope.
Nieberding traveled to Nashville to experience totality in 2017, but this one came to her.
“The last one gave me goosebumps, so I’m just so excited for this one,” she said as more students took their turns on the telescope and the moon hit the half-way mark in its march across the sun.
This article originally appeared on The Daily Record: 2024 total solar eclipse awes many in Wooster, Ohio
