Department Members Share their Total Eclipse Experiences

The Physics Department chartered a bus which took 50 members of the community to the eclipse's path of totality on Monday, August 21, 2017. The group traveled to Bryson City, North Carolina at the Swain County Event Park adjacent to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Prof. Ronen Plesser, Lab Administrator Yuriy Bomze, and graduate student Ryan Kozlowski set up viewing gear, shot footage, and entertained the crowd.

The video below was captured by Kozlowski. He acquired the images every 15 seconds from the beginning of the eclipse until the end of the eclipse and the finished video represents almost 2 hours of eclipse footage.

 

 

Many of the trip attendees shared their photographs:

The view of the gathering at Swain County Event Park, from Prof. Joshua Socolar

 

By graduate student Agheal Abedzadeh
By graduate student Yiqiu Zhao
By graduate student Hanqing Liu
Graduate student Erin Conley's collage depicting various ways she saw the eclipse (clockwise from top left: laced fingers as a pinhole, iPhone camera with eclipse glasses, the department's viewing apparatus, pinholes through a leaf)

Independent of the bus trip, other members of the department took in the event from different locations: Prof. Olivier Delaire (primary Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science) traveled to Lake Murray near Columbia, South Carolina and Lecturer Rob Brown watched from Summerton, South Carolina. Prof. Henry Everitt, who taught Intro to Astronomy for much of the 1990's, was in Sparta, Tennessee and used his personal telescope to show more than 100 people the eclipse on a screen. See a video of his presentation here. The photo below shows Prof. Everitt (second from left) and former Physics Department chair Frank De Lucia (second from right) who coincidentally was also in Sparta for the eclipse.

Many more photographs were shared so please hop over to our Flickr album to view more. Thank you to everyone who contributed. If you would still like to send in your own, please contact us at news at phy dot duke dot edu.