For the briefest of moments — eight seconds by one count, 12 by another — the total solar eclipse showed itself to the hundreds of revelers gathered Monday at Boerne’s Dog & Pony Grill ... and to the thousands staked out across the Hill Country.
A menagerie of license plates could be seen on Interstate 10 headed to Comfort, Kerrville and Fredericksburg. They were ever-present up and down the Hill Country Mile, and especially at the Kendall County Fairgrounds, where families staked out what they hoped would be good viewing sites.
Rasmus Birn was with his father, Joachim Birn, a senior research scientist at Los Alamos Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, who was attending a conference in San Antonio.
“We wanted to find something a little bit closer to the totality, and something where we could reserve a spot ahead of time, and this spot came up,” Rasmus said.
Rasmus, who lives in Wisconsin, saw the 2017 total eclipse, driving from Wisconsin to Kentucky. With him today was his Canon 70D camera with a 70-200 lens topped with a homemade filter — a pair of solar eclipse glasses taped to a cardboard cutout — that worked for him in 2017.
At the Dog & Pony Grill, Rick Palmer and his son, Steven Palmer, had their eyes to the skies, trying to get a glimpse of the sun and moon through the heavy cloud cover.
Rick, a resident of Edmond, Oklahoma, drove to Austin and picked up his son, a student at the University of Texas and drove over Monday morning.
“I saw this place online, and it looked like a great place to have fun, see the eclipse and hang out,” Steven Palmer said. “I called ahead of time, and they said it’d be no problem, just get here early.”
Rick said he approved of his son’s online find.
“The food’s great, the bar was open when we got here at 9, and the music’s great. Everyone’s having a good time, even if we can’t see the sun yet,” Palmer said.
Aaron Linaman drove his family from Las Vegas to the expansive Kendall County Fairground parking lot to witness their first total solar eclipse.
“I have a whole clan of friends here,” Linaman said. “We started planning this three years ago ... to make sure we could come out and hit this one.”
The clan stayed the night in San Antonio and “hung out in San Antonio, did the Riverwalk and the Alamo, and we’re here today.”
Harlan Stanley manned one of the larger telescopes and cameras set up on the Dog & Pony patio. “It’s a Dobsonian telescope, basically a large tube with a mirror at the bottom and a little mirror at the top, and a solar filter,” Stanley, an Austin resident, said.
The telescope is computer- controlled, tracking the sun as the earth rotates. The attached DSLR camera “is basically taking a picture every second.”
Stanley said he has not seen an eclipse with the telescope. He said he and his daughter, Avalon, picked up an interest in astronomy during the pandemic “and we were looking at the rings of Saturn, and Jupiter, and it’s pretty amazing.”
Boerne resident LeAnn Littrell staked out an area at the Dog & Pony, where she was able to “point and shoot” the total eclipse as clouds parted to give her — and the hundreds gathered there — something to cheer about.
“This is just a fun place to be,” she said. “I enjoy the company, the crowd, everybody’s having fun, that’s the main reason.”
She said she witnessed the partial eclipse in October but had never seen a total solar eclipse before.
“It was phenomenal, pretty neat to see,” she said, “because I probably won’t be around the next time it comes around.”
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