For a moment on Monday, the sky almost turned black.
Sixteen-year-old Jaelyn held a pair of paper glasses over her eyes and looked up. The view through the protective lenses reminded her of something from childhood.
“When you watch a Disney movie, and you see the little person sitting on the moon — it’s like that,” Jaelyn said. “A little person sitting there fishing on the moon. It was pretty cool.”
Students gathered on the football field at Crane Medical Prep High School on the city’s West Side to watch the solar eclipse firsthand in Chicago — where close to 94% of the sun was covered by the moon and the city was, for a little while, cast in an eerie darkness.
Crane was one of several schools across Chicago that held special viewing events to teach students about the rare astronomical event. The next total solar eclipse won’t cross North America until 2044, 20 years from now.
In ancient Greece, people saw an eclipse as a sign that the gods had abandoned them. Even in the information age, seeing the moon pass in front of the sun has the power to stir thought: Is it a reminder of human frailty — our smallness under the machinations of two celestial bodies? Or is it something darker — a bad omen, a symbol of the ill will lurking in the tangled depths of the human heart?
Crane’s AP English teacher had planned to explore some of those questions in a lesson on how the concept of a solar eclipse appears several times in Shakespeare’s writings: as a portent of bad tidings, in “King Lear”; as a metaphor for the darkness of the human psyche after Othello murders Desdemona; and in his poetry as the ruination of beauty. A solar eclipse occurred during Shakespeare’s lifetime in 1598, passing across England.
But Shakespeare didn’t have to contend with AP Exams, which on Monday ended up trumping that lesson plan in favor of content that was going to show up on upcoming exams.
Marilyn, 16, another student at Crane, said this was the first time she got a chance to look at an eclipse because the school provided protective glasses so students wouldn’t damage their eyes.
“I saw one in 2017 when I was young, and I was like ‘Why can’t I look up at the sun?’” she said, laughing. “I’m so glad I didn’t. Because right after that, I saw an interview with a woman who lost her vision because she looked at it.”
Some schools organized field trips for students to head to the path of totality — or parts of the U.S. where the sun’s face was completely blocked by the moon. Students from Budlong Elementary School visited Toledo, Ohio and middle schoolers from Mitchell Elementary School traveled to an organic farm in Noblesville, Indiana on Monday to see the total eclipse.
At Crane, students were clearly excited to get a look at the sun during the eclipse — and to get a chance to spend some time outdoors on a day with a high of 71 degrees. Kids laughed, talked, looked at the eclipse, and took the chance to throw a football in the brief reprieve between classes.
Chicago saw the most lunar blockage of the sun starting around 2:07 p.m., according to NASA. But people gathered across the city on Monday starting around 1:50 p.m., when the moon just started inching in front of the sun.
Matthew Atias, a geometry teacher at Crane, said he was excited to get a chance to show students how they could model the solar eclipse using quarters and a nickel to represent the sun and moon. He got the classroom assignment directly from NASA, Atias said.
“So this would have them follow the sun path and the moon path … to simulate the size between the sun and the moon and the apparent size from the distance,” he said. “It’s really a well-done activity.”
“We just started this unit last week. But the calculation we’ll be doing, it’s what we call ‘tangent lines,’” Atias said, noting that the unit aligns with the Common Core standards.
In the broader U.S., a large belt where the sun was completely blocked by the moon — known as “the path of totality” — stretched from the upper Eastern Seaboard down through Texas in a descending arc. According to NASA, the eclipse began over the South Pacific Ocean, and Mexico’s Pacific coast was the first location in North America to experience totality.