New Delhi: Eclipse mania gripped North America on Monday as a breathtaking celestial spectacle captivated tens of millions of people, offering a rare blend of scientific interest, commercial opportunity and daytime partying. The Moon’s shadow plunged the Pacific coast of Mexico into total darkness at 11:07 am local time (1807 GMT) then swept across the United States at supersonic speed, returning to the ocean over Canada’s Atlantic coast just under an hour-and-a-half after landfall.
Festivals, viewing parties and even mass weddings took place along the eclipse’s “path of totality,” where the Sun’s corona glowed from behind the Moon in a display that left crowds awestruck, news agency AFP reported.
People “screamed, they applauded, some were taking photos, others were kissing. Thousands of miles away in downtown Montreal, Canada, office workers spilled out of skyscrapers to snap pictures with their eclipse glasses held to their phones.
The path of totality was 115 miles (185 kilometers) wide and home to nearly 32 million Americans, with an additional 150 million living less than 200 miles from the strip, according to NASA, which ran a live webcast throughout.
The eclipse was also a windfall for scientists. NASA launched a trio of sounding rockets before, during and just after the eclipse to measure changes caused by the sudden darkness to the ionosphere, an upper layer of the atmosphere important for long-distance radio communication.
It also offered a golden opportunity to study the Sun’s corona, the outer layer of its atmosphere which is normally hidden by the blinding light of the surface, but has an outsized impact on everything from satellites to power grids.
“There’s a few high clouds but the beauty of the corona is clearly visible,” NASA heliophysicist Michael Kirk as the eclipse passed through Dallas was quoted as saying by AFP.
