Total solar eclipse: The amazing continental clock

Across a landmass 255 miles wide and more than 4,000 miles long, spanning Mexico, the United States, and Canada, tens of millions of people crane their necks, tilt their heads toward the sky, and wonder as day turns to night. I was looking at it.

What many people saw on Monday was a unique phenomenon. The moon moves between the Earth and the sun, extinguishing its light in a total solar eclipse.

The path of totality crisscrossed the continent, starting on the warm sands of a Mexican beach town, darkening skies above the crashing waters of Niagara Falls, and ending the journey on the shores of Newfoundland, Canada.

It left behind a sense of awe and reminded us of our planet's place in the universe.

The solar eclipse was first observed around Mazatlan on Mexico's west coast at 11:07 local time (18:07 Japan time).

At first, it looked like the moon's outer edge was just touching the sun. Then it dug deeper and deeper, and cheers erupted until finally everything went dark – except for the silvery glow of the sun's “corona” effect around the outline of the moon.

1,000 miles away in Dallas, Texas, 11-year-old Addie Walton King waited, feeling the excitement she had been building up for weeks ready to explode.

She learned all about solar eclipses in her fifth-grade class at Dallas Academy, and on Monday morning she laced up her shoes and shoved four pairs of eclipse glasses into her pink purse. One was for me, one for my parents, and one for my child. her sister Abigail;

Just before the start, Addy sat next to her father, Ryan, on a school field in downtown Dallas and looked up.

Everything felt slow, she said, describing a Texas afternoon as it started to get dark. She said, “It looked like the moon was biting the sun, but there were no tooth marks.''

Clouds came and went, occasionally blocking the view of the eclipse until the sun disappeared, leaving only small flares of light around the moon.

“I never expected something like this to happen,” Addy said. “It was really pitch black outside. I thought it was like dusk, but it was pretty close to pitch black.”

The temperature plummeted, and the animals fell silent, just as they had been taught.

“As it started to get light, the crickets showed up and the birds started chirping. It was really crazy,” she said. “I'm sad it's over.”

From there, the eclipse moved forward, carving a course northeast across the United States.

For some, the solar phenomenon marked a personal milestone, with hundreds of Americans taking part in one of several mass wedding events dotting the path to totality.

In Russellville, Arkansas, 300 couples from across the country signed up to participate just before the skies turned dark. When the sky brightened, the group cut the wedding cake and danced. All of this was part of the heart festival aptly named “Total Eclipse.”

Amateur astronomer Darcy Howard was chasing the moon one state over in Elsinore, Missouri. She drove from her home in central Arkansas so bad weather wouldn't block her view.

She has observed many solar eclipses to date, two in total: one annular and two partial eclipses. “Each one has a unique fingerprint,” she said.

Howard said the totality event at around 13:56 local time (18:56 GMT) today produced an “eerie twilight” with dim colors dotted along the horizon. The corona was almost as bright as the full moon. “There was an ethereal feeling all around,” she says.

The 70-year-old has loved space ever since she was a child, ever since her father showed her the Big Dipper, Polaris, and the Milky Way, and he bought her her first telescope.

“I was completely hooked,” she said. “When you look through a telescope, you see Jupiter…you see Saturn. And when you see it in space, you know all is well with the world.”

By 15:13 local time (20:13 GMT), the total solar eclipse had plunged midwestern Ohio into darkness.

Eclipse viewers enjoyed clear skies in Cleveland, where the sun's corona was clearly visible and a brilliant halo framed the moon.

New Year's Eve in mid-April, with stars shining in the middle of the day and cheers and fireworks.

Although many of America's largest cities were not fortunate enough to take the path of totalization, the sights were still awe-inspiring. In New York, hundreds of people flocked to the observation deck of Manhattan's Edge skyscraper to see what they could see.

Even as the sun shrank into a crescent-like mass of light, casting an unearthly pale darkness over the city, they left undismayed.

At Niagara Falls, where the eclipse path crosses from the United States to Canada, tourists were flocking to both sides of the border.

The weather was formidable here, with thick gray clouds almost hiding the sky from view.

However, just as the crowd was celebrating, the clouds parted and the black hole sun appeared.

At nearby Niagara City Cruises, 309 people dressed up as the sun to celebrate breaking the Guinness World Record for “largest gathering of people dressed up as suns.”

The inexorable movement of celestial bodies meant that the phenomenon did not last long, and Montreal was the next to have the opportunity to be plunged into a temporary night.

In Montreal, 20,000 people packed a field on McGill University's campus for an event hosted by McGill University's Trottier Space Institute.

“We were expecting 8,000 people,” program manager Carolina Cruz Vinaccia said later. The weather was perfect, sunny and bright skies. She said the crowd erupted in unison at the moment of perfect agreement.

“I still can't find words for how cool this was,” she said. “We're still going down.”

The crowds were even smaller on Fogo Island, Newfoundland, on Canada's east coast, but it was one of the last places you could see a full body.

Bethany Downery, a Newfoundland native who works for the European Space Agency, noted the spectacular views from the Fogo Island Inn on the Atlantic Ocean.

The sky was cloudy, but miraculously the clouds moved and there was almost totality, she said.

Thus ended a day of collective wonder and celebration. However, it left a permanent mark on many who witnessed it.

Thousands of miles up the road in Dallas, Addie Walton-King had a plan.

Texas won't reenter total orbit for another 300 years, so it must next head toward North America in 2044.

And by that time, she will have become an expert on total solar eclipses. “I want to be a scientist by then,” she said.

– With additional reporting from Brandon Livesay, Nada Tawfik, Nadine Yousif and Helena Humphrey