Well, the eclipse has come and gone.

Katie, of course, is in Paducah, one of the towns in the path of totality.

The eclipse is proving to be a big boost to local tourism.

The Paducah Convention and Visitors Bureau says the governor's office estimates 150,000 people were in western Kentucky for the eclipse.

That means spending in area shops, restaurants and hotels.

We were just stunned with the amount of people who've come out to Paducah.

We have folks coming from all over the world.

People and different different shops have talked about how they've met folks from different states, folks from different countries, and they've all converged here on Paducah.

Of course, you know, the eclipse itself will just last for a couple of minutes.

But I think they're going to find a place that they'll enjoy coming back to for a lifetime.

The Paducah CVB tells us they've recorded guests in town from 22 states plus Canada and Poland.

The Nassau Solar System Ambassador Program and its volunteers have been bringing the stars down to Earth for over 25 years.

The lead up to events like solar eclipses are the busiest times for the ambassadors who spend their free time traveling and educating people on the matters of earth, space and other sciences.

A natural ambassador visited Shelbyville last week to tell local astronomy enthusiasts about the significance of today's solar eclipse.

2017, I think, was the first year that I became a solar system ambassador.

It was actually a pretty intensive interview process.

You know, I had to write a little essay why I wanted to be a solar system ambassador, give them a few references of people that I've worked with in the past who were not on NASA's payroll by any stretch of the imagination.

But we are offered a lot of support from them.

We get access to mission scientists and engineers.

We get news fresh, fresh out of conferences every year.

There's lots of training sessions and things like that.

So they they do their best to support us.

And it's a pretty small portion of NASA's well.

It's a grassroots program.

We're going to plant the seeds and watch them spread.

And that's what we've done.

So we've grown from 16 to more than 1300 over the years.

They get to pick the topics that they know will be of interest to their communities even a little more.

So they can it can be earth science.

It could be the Webb telescope.

That could be rovers on Mars, human spaceflight, whatever they feel will be interesting to their communities.

We've been working with Dan Price for years.

We love working with him on high profile cosmic events like solar eclipses and UFO days and the information about an international space station.

And it's a great reason to bring the community together.

I've written for a number of papers across the bluegrass, but the consistent paper has been the State Journal in Frankfort.

When we have events, I kind of have a captive audience.

I have people that are already enthusiastic about space exploration or whatever topic I have to happen to be discussing that evening.

But with the newspaper, it could be anybody ranging in age from like 4 to 90 and from a wide variety of backgrounds.

So I have to make sure that there's something in there for everyone.

When I present information, I do it to enhance people's experience or enhance people's understanding of the world around them and help them to make better connections and really start to think critically about some of the things that they observe on a day to day basis or things that they observe maybe once every 20 or 30 years.

We're very busy now with the eclipse coming up.

Essentially, the eclipse is a star party in the daytime, and we are at the last eclipse of that total solar eclipse in 2017.

Ambassadors reached almost as many people in one day as we do generally in a year in person.

These eclipses don't come along all the time.

They're pretty rare events.

There's usually one about every 18 months, somewhere in the world, but it's rare that we get one here in the United States.

That we're able to is able to be seen by so many people.

The next big eclipse, the next big solar eclipse we have going across the nation is in 2045.

So get in now.

You can.