Total Solar Eclipse

MOLALLA, Oregon – This small Oregon town of just under 9,000 did little to promote itself as a destination in the path of totality, and by Sunday afternoon, residents weren’t sure what to expect during the eclipse. But come Monday morning, a thousand people had filled the city’s Fox Park to attend a celebration put on by the public library. People waited in line for Tang and Moon Pies, made crafts and waited for the sky to grow dark.

Pulling his cardboard eclipse glasses tight around his face, Cole Cullen squinted at a crescent of sun and counted down the minutes from the football bleachers at Eastern Washington University.

As the light grew long, shadows deepened and the world took on a hazy hue, Nathan Mauger and Connie Young said, ‘I do.’

The light dimmed, the air cooled and the solar eclipse showed its growing crescent in shadows cast by leaves. For a moment, as people turned their eyes sunward, or stared at their pinhole projections on the ground, or wondered what everyone was looking at, the world slowed down. Traffic calmed. Jackhammers stilled. People gathered on sidewalks.

Eclipse watchers started gathering on the Capitol Campus lawn around 8:30 a.m., while the full sun was rising over state office buildings to the east. Some came from a few blocks or a few miles away while Danielle Vukovich and Corbin Cronic drove from Woodinville, Washington.

ST. ANTHONY, IDAHO – When the last bright bit of light disappeared through the dark eclipse glasses and the sun winked out – turning the day dark – everybody in the park cheered. What had been baking-hot sun had gradually gotten cooler and cooler, and now, all of a sudden, it was dark – and cold. No one was left in the water, where earlier happy kids and parents had been splashing and frolicking. And the shrinking sliver we’d all been watching through our eclipse glasses had completely disappeared – there was just darkness there. Instead, as we all took off our glasses, we saw a black disk in place of the sun, surrounded by a bright, clear-white corona; points shot off it at the upper left and lower right.

When Josie Montgomery told her mom a solar eclipse would occur on her 15th birthday, the teen’s mom was skeptical. “She said, ‘You can’t believe everything you read on Facebook,’ ” Josie recalled.

When the last bright bit of light disappeared through the dark eclipse glasses and the sun winked out – turning the day dark – everybody in the park cheered. What had been baking-hot sun had gradually gotten cooler and cooler, and now, all of the...

Across the region, from the Oregon shores to atop buildings in downtown Spokane down to southern Idaho, people gathered to see the first solar eclipse over the United States since 1979.