A solar eclipse captivated millions of people in North America on April 8, from Mexico to Canada, passing through the United States. We collected testimonies in Mexico and Washington from people who were amazed.
“It was a magical, incredible moment, because you don't expect the amount of darkness that there will be. It was practically noon. In other words, the sun was at its peak and suddenly day turned into night. We managed to see some stars, some planets, due to the amount of darkness that occurred. We were able to see it without special glasses, it was with the naked eye already when it was in the total eclipse. And the sun looked white, the ring, the diamond they call it here, and the light obscured. It was an incredible image,” Ángel Ramírez, a witness to the solar eclipse in Canatlán, a municipality in the Mexican state of Durango, tells RFI, where the eclipse lasted four minutes and 29.9 seconds.
“It was something very, very nice”
The astronomical phenomenon also darkened the sky of Mazatlán, in the state of Sinaloa, offering hundreds of thousands of people an impressive postcard that said goodbye forming a solar halo. Carmen Solís, who works in the Department of Tourism of this region, witnessed this total solar eclipse: “It was wonderful, it really looked very good. It lasted about four minutes, like three, four dark minutes. The sun was completely covered, it got dark here in the area where we saw it, which is called Ricardo Flores Magón, it is the best area to see it. It looked great,” she explains.
“There were a lot of people. There were people from Hawaii, from Germany, from the United States, many foreigners and many people from right here, from Mexico. Everyone was wearing their sunglasses watching the eclipse, some shouting with excitement at this wonderful phenomenon. It felt like that adrenaline, that excitement the moment it started to get dark. It was something very very beautiful. The truth is that many of us did not think that we were going to experience a phenomenon like this. “People were very happy, they were satisfied,” he continues.
Solar eclipses occur when there is a perfect alignment between the Sun, Moon and Earth; These astronomical phenomena are not very frequent, they occur from time to time. The last time Mexicans enjoyed one similar was 34 years ago. On that occasion it was named “the eclipse of the century”, since it lasted seven minutes and two seconds, so far the longest recorded by NASA.
In Washington, it was possible to “connect with the cosmos”
From the roofs of buildings, from the streets, parks, parking lots, millions of people watched the eclipse in the company of their colleagues, friends and family, reports our correspondent in Washington, Cristóbal Vásquez. The sky darkened and the temperature change was felt during the eclipse. NASA was distributing glasses to be able to see it from the National Mall on a Monday that seemed like a holiday.
For citizen Cristina Sevilla, it was an opportunity to connect with the cosmos: “I think that from time to time it is good to consider our place in the cosmos and connect with these celestial events. So, if you can experience it with friends and family, it is a great occasion.”
Juan Riveros, a Venezuelan who lives in Washington, traveled to Arkansas where the eclipse could be seen in its entirety: “I traveled from Washington to Arkansas to a town called Pocahontas. It was a very nice experience, there were people from all over the United States here. I started looking at the license plates and saw people from California, Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Georgia, New Jersey, New York and many more states. The truth is that this exceeded all my expectations, I had never seen anything like it. The sky becomes dark in the middle of the day and you can see the corona around the sun. It is difficult to describe, but it is beautiful,” he expresses.
Experts predict that the next eclipse that can be seen in the United States will be in August 2044.