Out There: Cloudy, With a Chance of Awe Highlands Current Audio Stories

To observe a total eclipse in the American West in 1878, a group of female astronomers from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie made a cross-country journey to the outskirts of the fledgling city of Denver and stationed themselves atop a hill next to a Catholic hospital. Steadfast in their pleated dresses behind a cluster of telescopes, and in full view of a contingent of stunned reporters and nuns, they showed that women were just as capable of contributing to the grand march of science.
My journey from the Hudson Valley to the totality in 2024 was considerably less perilous, with the exception of some backups on the Thruway. My wife, son and I drove north to Rochester, under clear skies with the roadside willows blooming gold. We had chosen Rochester for two scientific reasons: First, it was smack in the middle of the Path of Totality, the 100-mile-wide belt stretching from Mexico to Newfoundland (the Highlands only reached about 93 percent).
Second, my wife is from Rochester, meaning we had free places to stay instead of spending $699 for a motel room that is usually $69.
We put the eclipse on our calendar two years ago. We checked in with everyone we knew in Rochester until we had secured a place to stay, a backup place to stay and a second backup. A million people descended on the Flower City, and we joined what seemed like all of them for a festival at the planetarium.
Since I had pulled my son out of school, I felt he could not return without learning something. So we learned that the last total eclipse in Rochester a century ago was hidden by clouds - which I should have recognized as foreshadowing. We learned how fast you would have to fly from Mexico to Canada to keep up with the totality (the speed of sound). And we learned how remarkable it is that our sun and moon are exactly the precise sizes and distances from the Earth to line up occasionally.
On other planets, the moons are too small or too big.
On Monday, we assembled in my uncle-in-law's backyard/field. We had telescopes and cameras and a tray of novelty cookies decorated to look like the moon covering the sun. We had everything we needed except an enormous fan to blow the clouds away.
I was disappointed, but then things started to get weird. About 20 minutes before the totality, the clouds looked less like clouds and more like William Blake's exaggerated drawings of clouds. The shadows became darker, and the clouds pulled toward us, as if the flat sky was becoming topographical.
Ten minutes later it was noticeably colder. Swarms of mosquitoes, the first of the year, appeared from nowhere. The spring peepers went from a whisper to a roar. The sky changed to a bruised mixture of black and blue that I had never seen. The streetlights came on. I tried to take photos but the camera in my phone kept trying to "fix" the image.
A thin band of sunset persisted at the bottom of the sky, in a 360-degree ring. And then, from west to east, a wave of brightness washed across the universe. It was over. The lights flickered off and the peepers faded. We hoped that the mosquitoes would also go away, but no luck with that.
Had you told me beforehand that clouds would block the totality, we might not have made the drive. But I'm glad we did. We remained stunned for several minutes. And the telescopes didn't go to waste: After the sun went down the skies became crystal clear and we were treated to dazzling views of the Pleiades, the Orion Nebula and Jupiter and its moons.
The next total eclipse over the continental U.S. won't be for 20 years, but there will be one over Sydney, Australia, four years from now on my birthday: July 22. We've marked our calendar.