Abstract

In 2024, a group of 10 friends and two corgis witnessed the total solar eclipse from a ranch in Texas Hill Country. It didn’t go how I had expected, and yet it was better than I could have imagined.

Our Adventure

It’s July, and I’m sitting at the Royal Library in Copenhagen, watching the rain dimple the sea through the window. Everyone told me that summer in Copenhagen is a dream. I would always respond that I did that on purpose, that I came here precisely for the good weather months, leaving the U.S. as soon as I could manage after the total solar eclipse on April 8^th, 2024. Since the first year of my PhD, I had been planning this extended research visit I would embark on during the summer before my final year. In the months prior to leaving, between visa appointments and international calls with Danish landlords, I had come up with an idea for the paper I would work on while researching in Copenhagen. As soon as I got here, a completely different project essentially fell into my lap – or really, was pitched to me by my new advisors in Copenhagen – and I was immediately enthralled. From my current vantage point, the harbor looks somewhat like a river, with smoothly passing boats and the occasional duck landing on the water. When I wrote about my experience watching the 2017 total eclipse, I was sitting at a coffee shop overlooking Town Lake with some of my closest friends on a cold winter day in Austin. From there, the lake sort of looks like a river, too. None of those friends are where I left them six months ago, and today, nearly all of us are in different time zones.

It was serendipitous that I ended up in Austin and would be living there when the total solar eclipse passed across the U.S. in 2024. Seven years ago, when I was just starting out as an astronomy undergraduate student, I turned my eyes up to the sky to witness the total solar eclipse of 2017. Given my astrophotography hobby, my proclivity for outdoor activities, and, of course, my occupational hazards, I had been anticipating this year’s eclipse since the spring of 2020, when I committed to pursuing an astronomy PhD at UT Austin.

And yet, with four years’ notice, I still didn’t manage to plan it in time. I had imagined that a big group of my friends and family – I would invite everyone I knew – would meet me in Austin. After my few years of living in Texas and camping, hiking, and backpacking all around the state (Figure 1), I knew some good spots to spend a night under the stars and a subsequent afternoon under the eerie dimness of a solar eclipse. And yet, I missed the moment to book a campsite. I can’t entirely blame myself – the state was projected to receive one million visitors for the eclipse. It was a big deal, and the high demand made even the most contrived campsites competitive.

 The plan only ended up coming together two months in advance. In February, I was on a work trip with my best friend Lindsay, another PhD student at UT Austin who works on all things astronomy education, participatory science, and dark energy. Lindsay witnessed the 2017 total solar eclipse while sitting in a kayak alone on Fontana Lake near Great Smokey National Park. She describes it as one of the contributing moments of clarity that convinced her to change her life, drop out of pharmacy school, and pursue a career in astronomy and physics education. For both of us, solar eclipses are almost sacred. While lamenting about our lack of plan for the 2024 eclipse, we discovered that there were available campsites at a ranch a couple hours’ drive west of Austin, perfectly in the path of totality. It was also going to be a hot air balloon festival.

We bought tickets first and asked questions later. We had both imagined our people would join us. For the most part, they did, although it wasn’t exactly the guest list I would have predicted. A few people traveled to Austin, including a couple of my friends from college, now in the thick of their own astronomy PhD programs across the continent. My mom, of course, joined after witnessing the awe of the 2017 eclipse with me and our big orange dog, Henri. One of my college friends brought her boyfriend and their two corgis. The rest were Austin locals, co-workers, roommates, some old and some newer friends. In total, there were 10 of us, and nearly as many group chats formed with random subsets of the full crew.

Eventually, we had it all figured out, except for the weather. We had been watching the forecast the week prior, and it wasn’t looking good. Spring has notoriously challenging weather for watching total solar eclipses. Of all the options across the country, Texas historically had the highest chances of clear weather and good visibility. That didn’t necessarily mean we would be meteorologically lucky on April 8^th. Some folks’ plans changed, but our group of 10 held steady. Even if camping under cloud cover was all it was, surely it would be fun anyway.

The day before the eclipse, my car of three people headed west, bringing with us an assortment of camping gear and a cooler full of homemade kombucha and yesterday’s BBQ. The primary motivation for camping the night before the eclipse was to avoid the traffic that would surely descend on the greater Austin area as its population was predicted to double. While Austin did sit in the path of totality, it was on the edge, meaning the duration of totality would be a bit under 2 minutes, compared to the 4 ½ minutes we would experience a bit further west of the city. Plus, we had the added bonus of avoiding the light pollution of the metropolis.

The drive to the ranch was lovely. It was sunny and warm, without being too hot. Often, April already feels like summer in Austin. With the recent rain, the Hill Country was green, with its usual combination of oak trees and cacti dotting the grassy landscape. Absentmindedly pessimistic, I had assumed our ranch campsite would essentially be a dirt patch. We were delighted to discover that while it was indeed a cow pasture, it was green, with scraggly trees conveniently scattered around the field, providing patchy shade. It was quiet at the cow pasture, our only neighbors other committed eclipse observers, a couple longhorns, and a small herd of goats.

One by one, our friends trickled in. We waved them over and created a little commune of cars and tents. We joined all of our picnic blankets, yoga mats, and camp chairs together to form a sort of conversation pit. It wasn’t until everyone arrived that I realized the only person everyone had in common was me. Initially, I felt a jolt of responsibility to make sure everyone was properly introduced and put at ease socially. It wasn’t a given that everyone would get along. Except, in a way, it was: all of us had come together for a common goal and a shared excitement for tomorrow’s cosmic event.

Plus, we were all stoked for the hot air balloons. If you had asked me in 2017 to predict what my experience at the 2024 eclipse would be like, I would never have guessed that I would learn the basics of ballooning. At first, we just watched the giant glowing lanterns float up and down, tethered to heavy pick-up trucks placed at the four corners of the field (Figure 2). After a few rounds, a few of us volunteered our body weight to hold down the basket as passengers hopped in and out. My biochemist roommate and I put our science backgrounds and natural charisma together to learn the physics and chemistry of balloon navigation from a man we quickly gathered was a fixture in the sport of ballooning. That earned us a free ride and a business card for our continued education as future hot air balloon pilots – in addition to the opportunity to help roll up the huge, colorful tarp into its little bag, like shoving a comically oversized sleeping bag in a human-sized stuff sack. 

Back at camp, the rest of the crew had gotten a campfire started. Conversation flowed easily, sweet treats were shared with abundance, and I basked in the glow of the flame and my gratitude for bringing an assortment of friends together and everyone getting along. I didn’t even have to be in the campfire conversation pit to enjoy its warmth. No one was surprised to look up and see me behind my tripod, shooting the twinkling of laughter and stars (Figure 3 and Figure 4).

 The following morning, we worked together to manifest clear skies and were rewarded with a few hopeful blue patches between clouds. One friend brought out tarot cards and provided readings. A recurring theme came to light: each of us was about to embark on some life transition, mostly related to our careers. A few of us had applied for big opportunities and were going to hear back soon. A few of us were about to move to new cities for the summer to advance our research. Ginny the Corgi had her cards read, and we learned that she was tired of being confined to her crate.

By the afternoon, it had become pretty overcast (Figure 5). As time passed and brought us closer to totality, the 12 of us (including the two corgis) sprawled out on our makeshift quilt of blankets and mats, each of us adorned with eclipse glasses. A couple of us set up our tripods and pointed our lenses toward the brightest point within the thick deck of puffy clouds. As the crescent of sunlight began to take shape, moments of thinner cloud cover were announced by hollers from a group of campers one field over. The lighting was eerie, making the landscape somehow appear both dimmer and sharper. The longhorns lay down and settled in for the night at noonish. Then: totality. Though the data are sparse and the impact of solar eclipses on local weather is not well understood, some scientists have supposed that the sudden cooling of the land during solar eclipses can cause certain types of clouds to quickly dissipate (Trees et al. 2024). Whether the natural chaos of cloud evolution or the dramatic dimming of sunlight was responsible, at totality’s opening performance, it felt like the Earth drew back its cumulus curtains for the big reveal. We had been waiting for this moment all day – and in a way, since 2017 – but were surprised when it happened nonetheless. It got unbelievably dark, and the birds quieted. We all cheered, and I remarked, astonished: “We have four minutes of this!”

Only half of us were professional astronomers, but that afternoon, we were all expert observers, diligently watching the Moon pass in front of the Sun. We relished the midday darkness and were awestruck by the visible red prominences around the glowing corona, which were massive loops of plasma emerging from the atmosphere of the Sun (Figure 6). The hot, electrically charged gas erupted from the chromosphere and traced the winding highway of magnetic fields generated by the Sun’s internal dynamics. I had seen a total solar eclipse before, and yet this was a completely new experience for me in ways I could have never imagined.

For centuries, we have been able to predict the orbits of the solar system bodies with incredible precision. We can know the exact second the Sun will be obscured by the Moon from our perspective at a cow pasture in the Texas Hill Country. To a certain extent, we can even predict the conditions of clouds on Earth covering that point of time and space. Sometimes, being able to make these predictions gives us a false sense of control over the future. Sometimes, too, our predictions are wrong, and we feel as though we’ve lost this control. During totality, it felt easy to let go of what I had predicted for this day and become unconcerned with controlling the experience. After our few eclipsed minutes, we looked back down at each other, full of gratitude and wonder for the cosmic orbits that brought our little community together here and now to witness this special moment in the orbits of the Earth, Moon, and Sun.