Solar eclipse thrills crowds in California as it darkens swath of countryside

Roughly a thousand people gathered on the athletic field outside the Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Caltech in Pasadena ahead of the eclipse. The crowd to enter the campus and grab protective eyewear was so large that it snaked at least a block along East California Boulevard.

Some families brought chairs and laid out blankets to relax and munch on snacks while they waited for the eclipse.

Ryan Rudes, a freshman at Caltech, skipped his math class to take photos of the eclipse. He created a makeshift eclipse filter for his Canon T6 camera using duct tape and lenses from his orange eclipse glasses. He had hoped to view the eclipse from Niagara Falls this year, but cloudy skies in the forecast for that part of the Northeast dashed his plans.

Don Payne, who lives near Caltech, was shocked by the size of the crowd at the school while he strolled along the campus with Bella, his 7-year-old Lakeland Terrier.

“There’s never any crowd [at Caltech] like this,” he said.

The buzz around this celestial event has been palpable, for both the scientific possibilities and the rarity.

The last total solar eclipse that crossed the contiguous United States was in August 2017, according to NASA. Another one won’t cross again for 20 years.

The eclipse will begin over the South Pacific Ocean and will move diagonally across Mexico, the United States and Canada. Mexico’s Pacific coast will be the first location in continental North America to experience totality, which will happen there around 11:07 a.m.

The eclipse will enter the United States in Texas and make its way through Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. A map on NASA’s website provides an approximate time that each location in the path of totality will see the eclipse.

More than 30 million Americans who live in the path of totality will get a chance to experience a total solar eclipse, and many others are preparing to travel to see the phenomenon. Cities in the path are expecting an influx of visitors and major traffic jams as people flood to those communities to get a glimpse of the scientific wonder.

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