Name: Total Eclipse in the Heart of Texas Hill Country
Uploaded: undefined
Duration: undefined

NOVA

Carlisle Companies

Viking

NOVA Science Trust Logo

In the hill country of Texas, the solar eclipse struck wonder and awe.

People from all over the country converge on a small Texas town to see a total solar eclipse.

In the hill country of Texas, the solar eclipse struck wonder and awe.

Total Eclipse in the Heart of Texas Hill Country

People from all over the country converge on a small Texas town to see a total solar eclipse.

Space & Flight

Total Eclipse in the Heart of Texas Hill CountryPublished: June 3, 2024Speaker 1: Oh my goodness.Speaker 2: Look! It's the solar eclipse!Speaker 3: This is a total eclipse of the sun. The sun is completely blocked out by the moon. The sun is actually 400 times larger than the moon. Yet during an eclipse, they seem almost the same size. A total eclipse is a sight of awesome beauty and one of nature's most spectacular displays.Jeff Stone: This a solar filter, by the way. You can safely look at the sun with this. No problem at all. I think that's 93 million miles away and I can see it so clearly in here. We've been a hockey family for a long, long time, so we built a telescope out of hockey sticks. This will be its fourth eclipse. It'll be our fifth. We're very excited about the eclipse tomorrow. Even if it is cloudy, you know what? We're still all going to be together. It's going to get darker than it is, whatever it is.Once we decided to make the retirement decision to live here ...Speaker 5: Are you going to take us up, baby?Jeff Stone: We started looking for property, and my wife wanted a view over the hills, and I wanted the best view of the eclipse.Speaker 5: Come over here, hockey lady.Jeff Stone: We met when we first got hired on back in 1989.Susan Stone: I never dreamed I'd worked for NASA.Jeff Stone: Both of us wound up working in the control center supporting shuttle flights for about 10 years. Well, every time I talk about eclipses, even today, many years later, I get goosebumps talking about it because it's just such a different and deep emotional experience that it's hard to even imagine.Susan Stone: I'm looking forward to seeing everybody's reaction when they see totality.Jeff Stone: What do they do? That's pretty good. That's about right.Chap Percival: We're here in a dark sky site and I thought it would be a great idea to have a star gaze. So I brought my telescope and we're setting up to look at the stars. Combine the two, having a dark sky event the night before, and then having the total solar eclipse, it just doesn't get any better than that from my standpoint.I have traveled to see six of them. This will be number seven, lucky number seven, I'm hoping. So if you look in the west, up a few degrees, fairly high is a star that you can see with the naked eye now, and that is the planet Jupiter. I am most excited about sharing this with people who have never seen one. I'm a teacher and I get my highs from showing people things that they've never seen before.Speaker 8: What do you want to be when you grow up?Speaker 9: What I'm wearing.Speaker 8: Tell me.Speaker 9: Well, an astronaut.Speaker 8: Where do you want to go? What do you want to see?Speaker 9: The Lunar Gateway.Speaker 8: He's a die hard.Speaker 9: I want to see the surface of the moon and an earth rise.Speaker 10: How are you? Nice to see you.Speaker 5: Welcome to Earth. How was it out there?Speaker 8: You to take your finger, bring it closer and further away. It's kind of the same kind of idea, right?Chap Percival: This is a drama filled event. It starts out slow.Speaker 11: I saw the sun briefly. The edge of the moon.Chap Percival: The sun gradually gets covered. For 45 minutes it looks like there's nothing going on ...Speaker 14: It's a pinhole camera.Chap Percival: ... Because your eyes are getting adjusted as the sunlight fades gradually, and then when there's 15 minutes before you suddenly realize that the sky's not the same color.Speaker 2: I see it. It's almost there.Speaker 15: With, let's keep going. It's going to do it. Come on, come on, move clouds.Chap Percival: And then you notice the impending darkness. The temperature drops. And then totality. It's a celebration.Speaker 2: I saw it!Chap Percival: It's just an absolutely amazing inflow.Mark Gambler: 15 of us came. I don't know. It's like magic. It's an unbelievable magical thing.Chap Percival: Part of what these eclipses are all about for me is making memories, because what is your life? Without memories, what is your life?

United States

Northern Mariana Islands

Puerto Rico

American Samoa

Guam

U.S. Virgin Islands

U.S. Minor Outlying Islands

US & Territories

Colossal explosions shake a remote corner of the Siberian tundra, leaving behind massive craters. In Alaska, a huge lake erupts with bubbles of inflammable gas. Scientists are discovering that these mystifying phenomena add up to a ticking time bomb, as long-frozen permafrost melts and releases vast amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. What are the implications of these dramatic developments in the Arctic? Scientists and local communities alike are struggling to grasp the scale of the methane threat and what it means for our climate future. (Premiered February 2, 2022)

In the Arctic, enormous releases of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, threaten the climate.

Arctic Sinkholes

The top half of Jupiter in blue and green against a night sky

A composite image of Jupiter using images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Jupiter ERS Team; image processing by Judy Schmidt.

Explore the cosmos, delve into ancient history, and follow an extreme rescue with NOVA’s most-watched documentaries released in 2022.

NOVA’s most popular science documentaries of 2022

Four bright orange loops brand off of a dark blue blob

A transmission electron micrograph of HIV-1 virus particles (orange) replicating from the plasma membrane of an infected H9 T cell. Credit: NIAID, Flickr

Scientists have cured a handful of people of HIV by piggybacking on treatments they received for blood cancer. But does that bring a widespread cure any closer?

Total Eclipse in the Heart of Texas Hill Country

Support Provided By

Explore More

The force that makes up more than half of the universe

How America watched the solar eclipse

Great American Eclipse

Transcript

Credits

Support Provided By

Explore More

The force that makes up more than half of the universe

How America watched the solar eclipse

Great American Eclipse