Six months before the total solar eclipse of 2024, friends from Montana invited us to join them in a road trip to Uvalde, Texas, where the totality occurred at 1:27 Central Time on Monday.
The skies over Uvalde in April are typically sunny, so we had a good chance of seeing this celestial event, which won’t occur again in the United States until 2044.
But on the day of the eclipse, we woke to heavy cloud cover over Uvalde and the surrounding communities. So we drove 60 miles west and found a remote access road, parked there and prayed for the best.
The clouds remained, but there were some patches of blue sky. Four minutes before the totality, the dark clouds opened and we witnessed one of nature’s most spectacular lightshows.
The sky darkened, the air cooled, and birds stopped singing. At the totality, the sun became pitch black except for the fiery halo of its corona.
Three red gems called Bailey’s Beads, caused by mountains on the moon, appeared like sapphires around the edge of the corona.
For four minutes, the day took a time out, and we marveled at the ethereal beauty of the eclipse and the ingenuity of the scientists who calculated when and where it would occur so we could observe it.
Terry Bacon is a Durango resident who made the trip to Uvalde, Texas to see the eclipse in its totality.
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