Reflections on the 2024 Solar Eclipse

April 8, 2024, a day that I’m calling WVU Astronomy Day, marked the last time Morgantown, West Virginia will see a solar eclipse of similar magnitude for the next two decades, and we at the WVU Planetarium made sure to make it count! Susie Paine and I, both graduate teaching assistants in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, planned a successful viewing party on the Mountainlair Green, behind the WVU Mountainlair Student Union. We started planning several months in advance. Susie and I also connected with several news and media outlets through interviews to help build interest in the eclipse and specifically the planetarium viewing party.

While we could only hand out about a thousand solar eclipse glasses, the over five thousand attendees enjoyed the featured events, like viewing through telescopes with special solar filters; a specially designed H-alpha telescope; academic posters presented by students in the ASTR 106L Descriptive Astronomy Lab course; science demonstrations performed by volunteers from the WVU Physics and Astronomy Graduate Student Organization and Society of Physics Students, as well as two astronomy postdoctoral researchers; and children’s coloring activities.

The H-alpha telescope was my favorite activity. This telescope is special because it can only view a particular wavelength of light 656.28 nanometers, called H-alpha, , which the Sun emits strongly. By limiting all other wavelengths of light from the Sun, the image created on the eyepiece is dim enough to be viewed safely. Otherwise, you could go blind or suffer vision damage! The instrument was able to capture a beautiful image of the Sun shown below during the peak of the eclipse. Prominently (pun intended) at the top of the image is a solar prominence which is a large grouping of solar plasma extending far from the Sun’s visible surface, the photosphere. The Sun appears red here due to the H-alpha filter, since 626.28 nanometers is in the red part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Another big hit at the event were the academic posters. Students taking ASTR 106L designed posters and explored solar eclipse-themed topics of their choosing. Topics included Eclipses and the Science of Marketing; using eclipses to validate Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity; eclipses in Norse, Chinese, Native American, and Persian mythologies; and the history of solar eclipse predictions. Event-goers appreciated learning about solar eclipses from new perspectives and asked some of their most pressing questions.

We celebrate holidays like President’s Day and Labor Day every year, but it’s not often that we get to celebrate Astronomy Day. All in all, Susie, the awesome volunteers, and I helped make the WVU celebration of Astronomy Day possible. With the next full solar eclipse in Morgantown being in 2099, we need to start planning the next event soon!