Juan Monroy

Hard to believe that it was seven months ago to the day that I went with some friends to watch the total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024.

It happened to be my friend’s birthday that day, and we made a whole weekend out of it. It also helped that he and his wife have a house in Vermont, which was close to the path of totality, but still required us to drive about 150 miles to see the sun completely disappear. We eventually arrived at Lyndonville, Vermont, a village about 50 miles south of the US-Canadian border in the region known as Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Not only was Lyndonville in the path of totality, but it was far enough east that there were not any clouds to obscure our view.

A few days before the actual eclipse I had watched a documentary on NOVA about the Great American Solar Eclipse which had accelerated my interest in the event, and made me look forward to it even more than ever. The most fascinating fact about a solar eclipse was that the corona, and that it was the hottest thing we can ever see on earth. The corona’s temperature can reach up to 3 million degrees Celsius, while the Sun’s photosphere, which is the part we see, has an average temperature of around 5800 degrees Celsius. We can really only see it during a total solar eclipse.

My interest in photographing the eclipse was to capture more earthly phenomena. One of those was how we had a temporary sunset and sunrise, and how the light would change throughout the event.

During totality, it would be almost entirely dark. Only the light from the corona and any artificial, such as the lamp posts in this park, would illuminate our scene.

Following totality as sunlight began to peer through behind the moon, we were bathed in the whitest light I have ever seen. Everything looked like we were illuminated with fluorescent lights, or as I described at the time, as if someone had turned on the old sodium lights at a ballpark.

The only thing that made the trip difficult was the traffic. It took us about five hours to drive about 150 miles. Each way. And the totality event was only about two minutes long. But as just about everyone who has experienced a total solar eclipse will attest…

It was absolutely worth it.