MIDDLEBURY — While many of the solar eclipse viewers that attended a Middlebury College campus-wide viewing event trickled away from the event and back to their daily routines only moments after totality, Astronomy Professor Eilat Glikman and her daughter Navah, 15, were two among the smattering who stayed put.
“It was a really amazing human experience that we just all shared,” Glikman said. She said she and her daughter, after their first eclipse-watching, were opting to remain seated to take a moment to process the total eclipse from their hillside picnic blanket.
Navah expressed equal amounts of awe. “That was not even what I was expecting; like I knew (the sun) was going to glow, but it was just so crazy.”
Glikman said that they opted to view the eclipse with the crowd of college students laying on picnic blankets, tossing frisbees and playing spikeball because “this is where the party was at.”
“I was like, I just want to be around people. There was this added aspect to everybody like just cheering, and sort of being just present together. That was really special,” she said.
On the opposite side of the massive lawn where people had congregated, Middlebury College Observatory Specialist Catherine Miller, 32, snapped solar photos of her first total solar eclipse.
Using two cameras, she collected close-ups of the sun and captured the way the sun was moving across the sky.
“This is just to kind of document it (the eclipse) for Middlebury, because I’m not sure if anyone else was doing this, so I was like, I have the equipment, I’m new to solar photography, but I figured, why not give it a try,” she said.
“That was wild,” Miller said about the overall experience of her first total solar eclipse. “When we were in full totality I looked up and was just like, woah.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled two instances of Eilat Glikman’s surname.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Middlebury scientists revel in their first total solar eclipse.