Seattleites escape clouds, chase solar eclipse across the continent

Perhaps the Seattleites who had the foresight to get out of Dodge to see the total solar eclipse Monday had the right idea.

The cloud-choked skies of Western Washington stole the show from the moon, hiding the eclipse behind a wall of gray.

But the Seattleites who traveled to the path of totality — a 115-mile-wide band stretching from Mazatlán, Mexico, to Newfoundland, Canada — were treated with a rare sight. As the moon slid between the sun and Earth, it blocked the face of the sun, creating the last total solar eclipse visible from North America for two decades.

Alan Vogt, a member of the Seattle Astronomical Society since 2017, flew down to Mexico with his wife Wendy to watch the eclipse.

The skies were mostly clear — “just some thin clouds,” he said — for the Vogts and hundreds of other viewers gathered on the sandy shores of Mazatlán.

“There was this energy in the crowd. Everybody cheering and stuff like that,” he said. “It was really great.”

This wasn’t the pair’s first time watching the eclipse. They traveled to Oregon to view the 2017 total solar eclipse, which made him “excited about astronomy again” and inspired him to join the Seattle Astronomical Society.

On Monday, in Mexico, the pair stood in the moon’s shadow and witnessed the sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, which is too dim to see when the sun is not covered. Armed with two telescopes, they also saw pink and purple solar flares shooting out from the sun’s surface, “which you could never, ever see in normal circumstances,” Vogt said, “and they were just so beautiful.”

“If you cranked your head out from the telescope, you’d notice there was a sunset 360 degrees around us. We’re in the dark area, in the totality, but all around us is sunshine,” he said, adding that they also saw an array of planets in the sky.

Cindy Clark, another member of the Seattle Astronomical Society, traveled to Waxahachie, Texas, for the eclipse.

Clark reserved an Airbnb for the trip in 2022, she said, but despite years of planning, “the weather was very bogged in with heavy clouds this morning … very disheartening.”

Mother Nature relented as totality approached, though, “and at full totality, we had nothing but clear skies. I could see the sun, the full corona around the sun, a beautiful prominence and Jupiter and Venus,” Clark said.

The Seattle Astronomical Society canceled its monthly board meeting on account of members, like Vogt and Clark, traveling for the eclipse.

A group from the University of Washington — Baptiste Journaux, a research assistant professor of Earth and space sciences, and four graduate students — also chased the eclipse across the country.

The group’s original itinerary landed them in Missouri, but with a thick blanket of clouds, they went to the border of Arkansas to watch day turn to dusk, according to Journaux’s X account.

Before setting out on the trip, Journaux told UW News he and the students hoped to observe the eclipse in totality for over four minutes, which is significantly longer than the 2017 eclipse.

The group brought a special telescope to capture parts of the sun and surrounding skies that only reveal themselves during a solar eclipse. The telescope, known as an H-alpha telescope, is capable of observing the sun in a single wavelength of hydrogen, which is what the sun is mostly made of, to capture images of its surface features.

The group expected to see more solar features than in 2017, too, like large plasma bridges (or prominences) suspended over the surface of the sun by its strong magnetic field.

“The main thing is experiencing a unique cosmic event that really gives perspective on the size and force of the universe. This is, honestly, one of the most incredible things that one can experience. Sharing that with our students will be a privilege,” Journaux said before the trip.

Back on the UW campus, students, staff and other curious viewers gathered at the physics and astronomy building Monday morning and looked skyward.

Their collective will was not quite enough to pierce Seattle’s cloud cover, but UW Astronomy and the Seattle Astronomical Society provided telescopes and eclipse glasses nonetheless.

The next total solar eclipse visible across a coast-to-coast swath of the U.S., like Monday, will be Aug. 23, 2044. But even then, the path of totality won’t pass through Seattle — only parts of North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana will be lucky.