A Langley Intern Traveled 1,340 Miles to View a Total Solar Eclipse. Here’s What She Saw.

Emma Friedman, an Office of Communications intern at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, understood that the total solar eclipse on April 8^th, 2024, was an out-of-this-world opportunity she couldn’t miss.

Equipped with the proper eye protection, I traveled over one thousand miles to Dallas, Texas, to be in the eclipse’s path of totality. As I got situated in a park near the city, I was excited—I’d read books and seen photos of what an eclipse looked like and knew what to expect, but I also knew that seeing it in person would be something greater than fiction. Slowly but surely, the Moon took more and more “bites” out of the sun, until I saw the last little peek of light before the darkness; this is known as the “diamond ring effect.”

Before I had time to process any of it, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. A silence fell across the park—even the birds stopped chirping—and I held my breath. All you could hear was the rustling of branches. What was a warm spring day was now a cold, dark dusk. It felt like the world had flipped on its head—first slowly, and then all at once. What the Sun had just seconds before lit was now a black void. The glow I saw around the Sun was its outer atmosphere, known as the corona. It was a moving sight, but why did I travel so far to experience it? Surely a viewing of a total eclipse was not in need of a plane ride.

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