STA Celebrates Solar Eclipse

The St. Albans community flocked to Herman Plaza to celebrate the solar eclipse on Monday, which brought more than 90% totality to Washington, DC.

With efforts spearheaded by Forms C,B, and A science teacher JT Miller and eclipse glasses generously donated by the Parents’ Association, students, faculty, and staff were able to enjoy the extraterrestrial phenomenon.

Using a cereal box and hole punched paper, Mr. Miller demonstrated the shadow of the eclipsed sun to make the exciting day educational for Lower School students, many of whom were experiencing the first solar eclipse of their lifetime.

As the sky darkened, students gathered in awestruck silence, watching the sun nearly disappear.

But it wasn’t only on campus that the community took on the eclipse. Spurred by a phone call from Dan Daniels ’45 who advocated for a school field trip, math teacher Michael Hansen and Director of Alumni Relations Lanier Frank ’79 led a trip to Pennsylvania to reach a point of complete totality. 

Five students joined the trip to experience the complete darkness that won’t occur again in the continental United States for about 20 years. 

The group joined a crowd of many hundreds at Allegheny College in Meadville, PA, in the path of totality, staking out space at the football stadium to hear live commentary by an astronomy professor.

Said Hansen: “I wish now that I had ditched my camera and had spent the whole two and a half minutes of totality looking straight at the moon. There is no way to describe it adequately. It was a dark (not black) ball in perfect 3D relief, not looking at all like the disk we are accustomed to seeing at a full moon. Of course, this was a new moon, the opposite of a full moon, except with a delicate halo (corona) around it. No photo can really do it justice. The horizon was orange, as it would be toward the end of a sunset.”

The next eclipse that will be this close to DC will not occur until 2078.

Enjoy photos from the day: