Thousands gazed with wonder at Monday's total solar eclipse, which cut a 117-mile-wide path of totality across Arkansas.
The city of Little Rock's official event featured a free concert playing the entirety of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” at the First Security Amphitheater downtown. Photographer Jordan Mozley made the trip from Atlanta.
He says seeing the 2017 solar eclipse made him want to document the celestial event.
"They say this one's special... they say the next one won't be for another 300 years, for this magnitude of the eclipse. So I figured, I've got to photograph this one," Mozley said.
Jamie Wallace traveled with her neighbors from the Los Angeles area to see the celestial event. She says she still has fond memories of seeing her first eclipse in Mexico in the early ‘90s.
"That's a couple decades ago at this point, and the thought of being able to see another one is just magic," she said. "You really get a sense of how incredible nature is."
Totality lasted just over two minutes in the central Arkansas area, with cities further west experiencing as many as four minutes of darkness.
Visitors and central Arkansas residents both expressed surprise at a relative lack of crowds. Karen Stout, also from the Los Angeles area, described the scene at the Little Rock airport as "shockingly empty."
"It was pretty dead, we were all kind of surprised. We were talking to people in the community, our bartenders and servers were like 'We're expecting 80,000 people. Where are they?'"
Mark Dennis drove up from Birmingham, Ala., but spent Sunday night in Memphis, just in case of heavy traffic. He says getting to Little Rock was much easier than he expected.
"We left Memphis around 7 a.m. to avoid traffic jams... but once we got here, we were like 'I don't think we have to really worry about waiting on the road for five, six hours," he said.
Farther west in Russellville, amateur photographer Bartosz Wojcynski set up his array of equipment at the Russellville Soccer Complex. Wojcynski originally traveled to Houston from his native Poland, but made a last-minute switch to Arkansas because of unfavorable weather conditions in Texas.
"It depends on the thickness of the cloud cover, there is no hard limit on whether the photo is going to be trash or a masterpiece," he said. "But if there are only high clouds, then it's manageable because high clouds are translucent as opposed to medium and low clouds when the sun can be completely obscured."
Heavier, lower cloud cover was forecast for much of Texas and southern Arkansas Monday, but most communities along the eclipse's path in the state only saw high-altitude clouds.
Visitors at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s eclipse watch party got the chance to see the eclipse through multiple telescopes set up for the day. Gregory Guisbiers is a professor of Physics at UA Little Rock and has been helping to plan the event for months. He said he was concerned about bad weather over the weekend.
“When I woke up this morning and saw the clear skies I was relieved.” He said.
Guisbiers said he expected out-of-state visitors to travel to areas of maximum totality, such as Hot Springs or Russellville. For Guisbiers, the benefit of watching the eclipse at a university is the ability for whole families to enjoy the event.
“We are able to reach all the categories of people. You know the nerds are really interested by the science and we have physics demonstrations inside, there’s a planetarium and telescopes for children, and a big one for adults.”
The university also had a special device translating solar rays into sound, allowing visually-impaired people to hear the high-pitched tones fade as the moon passed over the sun.
Karen Jack is a student at the UA at Little Rock. She felt amazed as the first person in her family to see a total eclipse.
“This is history making for me. I’ve seen it on TV and now I’ve seen it in person. I’ll remember this for a long time.” Jack said.
Emergency Preparations
The Arkansas Division of Emergency Management set up a control room where they monitored the day's festivities.
During the eclipse, ADEM officials, state police and representatives of various state agencies were stationed at the control room at the Arkansas National Guard's Camp Joseph T. Robinson in North Little Rock. Amid rows of computers, emergency officials tracked the trajectory of the moon as it went in front of the sun. The officials also monitored traffic and weather on a big screen.
ADEM Director A.J. Gary said this was the best way to have effective communication.
“We're monitoring everything that's going on in the state,” he says. “And we have those key players here, so if anything happens there right here and they can coordinate whatever might be needed.”
Speaking on Monday morning, Gary expected it to be a “calm day.”
The department prepared for the event by doing simulations over the past year. This included “tabletop exercises” where officials meet to discuss how to handle different disaster scenarios. They also did “monthly coordination calls” where they talked with other agencies about how they planned to handle the eclipse.
Traffic
The once-in-a-lifetime event was predicted to cause several hours of traffic build up. But for the most part on Monday, there wasn't a lot of traffic on the roads.
Ellen Coulter from the Arkansas Department of Transportation said people opted to stay home.
“The roads are kind of dead right now,” she said around 10 o'clock Monday morning. “I think what we're seeing is the roads are pretty clear because people are working from home today, schools are off and people are purposely avoiding the roads.”
Her concern was that Monday night the roads could get more clogged as people leave their parties. Coulter urged visitors to stay in Arkansas until Tuesday.
She based some of her predictions off the experiences of other states during the 2017 eclipse.
“We heard horror stories in 2017 of other states where people left in the immediate aftermath of the eclipse and it just created gridlock on their highways.”
Safety teams are positioned along major Arkansas highways in case of a traffic accident. As of Monday, state parks were packed with hundreds of cars parked across the state.
Estimates had predicted as many as 1.5 million visitors to Arkansas for the solar eclipse. The next total solar eclipse to pass through Arkansas won't be until August 2045.
