600+ Gather for Partial Eclipse

(From left) Ellen Binard and Theresa Schmelzer, both from Sturgeon Bay, try out their special total solar eclipse glasses. Photo by D.A. Fitzgerald.

What’s been called the cosmic event of the decade perhaps mustered less enthusiasm in places like Door County that were outside the solar eclipse path of totality, but it still drew hundreds, April 8, to the Door Peninsula Astronomical Society’s (DPAS) Utah Street campus in Sturgeon Bay. 

“I think we had possibly about 600 people there,” said DPAS’s Tom Gwilym, and for him, “the most people I’ve seen there so far for an event.”

DPAS volunteers handed out solar-viewing glasses for safe observation as the moon glided across the sun, covering about 86% of it from the Door County viewing platform. Spread across the lawn between the Leif Everson Observatory and the Ray and Ruthie Stonecipher Astronomy Center, the DPAS volunteers offered other safe-viewing methods: a few solar scopes; one regular telescope capped with a solar filter; a homemade viewing board attached to a scope (the viewing platform made from a box lid by DPAS board member and program director, Steve Ransom-Jones); and scope-viewing boards that DPAS Board President David Lenius ordered, and then used as a model to make a few more himself.

The moon began edging between the sun and earth at close to 1:30 pm with few clouds in the sky at the Sturgeon Bay location. At its peak, the partial eclipse didn’t darken the day much before leaving the sun entirely by 2:30 pm. The steady, brisk wind at the location seemed to calm down a bit once the sun was covered, Gwilym said.

“At least I didn’t feel as cold after the second half of the show,” he said.

A total eclipse won’t be visible again from the contiguous U.S. until 2044. Photos by D.A. Fitzgerald.