Apr 9

Apr 9 Total Solar Eclipse 2024

Christopher and I love an eclipse! We came to Muncie, IN to be in the path of totality for the total solar eclipse yesterday and it was amazing. A big bonus of going to Muncie was getting to see the eclipse with my brother, sister-in-law, nieces, and my sister-in-law’s family (her parents are from Muncie)!

We set up our chairs and snacks in the shade and strapped on our eclipse glasses.

We watched the eclipse from Ball State University, and some of the students sent up a weather balloon, which was a lot of fun to watch. The photos we tried to take with our phones and eclipse glasses aren’t great, but I’m sharing them anyway. If you want nicer pics, this ain’t the place, try here.

During totality, it was so much darker than I thought it would be. The street lights even came on! It got so cool out, and it was incredible how quickly it warmed back up after the sun started to peek out again.

Our other favorite part of an eclipse is shadows! It’s cool to see all of the unexpected pinholes. The shadows below were on the playground. You can kind of see the flooring has holes in it, so when the sun shined through them it created a pinhole camera effect and caused little eclipses to show up on the walls.

It was such a fun day, and I highly recommend trying to see a full solar eclipse in the path of totality at least once in your life if you can. It’s incredible. Of course, we didn’t leave Lucy out! She may have been in the hotel room during the eclipse, but we still let her try out the cool shades.

We weren’t able to travel to see the 2017 solar eclipse in the path of totality, but we made the best of it. By the time I tried to buy eclipse glasses everywhere was sold out, so I made eclipse viewers. I used wrapping paper tubes and a cereal box and instructions from the internet. I had a new student orientation session at the time of the eclipse, so I had all the students come out to the parking lot and take turns using the eclipse viewers. Some of my coworkers joined us and a few had eclipse glasses that they shared. It was a lot of fun.