For the first day of classes, students and faculty gathered to view the total solar eclipse with items varying from telescopes to kitchen colanders on the quad at Lipscomb University.
Lipscomb went all-out preparing for the eclipse, as the school passed out 3,000 solar eclipse glasses to students and faculty beginning at 8 a.m. this morning. However, some viewers went the old-fashioned way instead and used a pinhole projector to view the eclipse.
Audio feature: Booths were also set up in the square to commemorate the event with engineering students selling solar eclipse T-shirts to fund their projects and missions. Students were loud and excited on the quad, ready to witness the once-in-a-lifetime eclipse. Lipscomb Academy students gathered at the football and baseball fields to watch. Interview by Cavin Jacobson
Photo gallery by Anna Rogers
SGA President Carson Panovec had some fun celebrating the eclipse on the quad by answering a few trivia questions, which can be found on Lumination Network’s live stream.
Lipscomb Bible professor Dr. Terry Briley brought a colander from his wife’s kitchen to the eclipse-viewing party.
“If you look at the reflection as the sun comes through it, you see a reflection of the phase, so all these are round holes, but you see little crescents instead,” Briley said, demonstrating how to use the colander. “So that’s one of the ways of seeing it without hurting your eyes. You could also see at one point how it would come through the leaves of the trees and make sort of crescents and ripple-like effects.”
One of Dr. Briley’s Bible students, freshman Maeve Miller, raved about the experience and what it was like to experience totality.
“We were standing on the steps of Collins, and as soon as it started getting dark, everyone was screaming because they were all super caught off guard, and then when it was just about to cover the entire sun, there were like lines on the concrete, and kind of like in a swimming pool when the sun comes through, and you can see a reflection,” Miller said. “That was really cool — and then just like it being super dark at 1:30 in the afternoon. And then crickets also started chirping.”
Briley added that his favorite part about viewing the eclipse was the brief time when you could take your solar eclipse glasses off because the sun was totally covered.
“It was really beautiful,” Briley said. “You had to sort of know that the sun was still there somehow — I’m just trying to think in the sense of somebody who didn’t know beyond what that was like. And the fact that it lasts such a short time — and if something happened like how that occurred, and they didn’t have any scientific explanation.
“It was interesting to hear . . . I had a Bible major class at 10:00, and they were sort of half-heartedly talking about apocalypse-kind of stuff when this was happening and automatically gravitating toward that.”
Along with a majority of the campus, junior Hannah Flees also went out to the quad to witness the eclipse, noting that the event “defied her expectations,” and she loved the environment of being surrounded by friends and classmates while cheering with every change in the sky.
“I was reluctant to anticipate the experience to be super amazing in fear the eclipse wouldn’t live up to all the hype,” Flees said. “I found the whole experience to be one of the coolest moments of my life. The view of the blacked-out moon with a full ray of white surrounding the edges and plasma emitting in a star-like formation was breath-taking.”
Photo gallery by Becca Risley
The 1:40 totality of the eclipse on August 21, 2017. Inset video Brian O’Neal; drone footage by Sarah Gibson; editing by Cavin Jacobson.
Total solar eclipse drone footage overlooking the Lipscomb quad by Sarah Gibson and Cavin Jacobson.
Featured image by Ben Davis
Lumination Network’s total eclipse coverage reported by: Erin Franklin, Anna Rogers, Becca Risley, Ben Davis, Lindsey Nance, Hannah Pipher, Lorena Coleman and Cavin Jacobson