By Kendra Streicher

The excitement builds as the corona slowly covers the moon. It gets so dark that the street lights turn on. It’s been 38 years since the last total eclipse in the United States, and senior Cameron Ling has been excited since last year to watch the 2017 solar eclipse. Ling described himself as an “amateur astronomer,” so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he has been waiting for this eclipse. Some of his friends even call him “NASA” because he often wears shirts from the space organization.

On Aug. 21, early in the morning, Ling made his way excitedly to a small town in Missouri with his mom and grandparents. Ling decided that he wanted to travel to Missouri, the closest point for the path of the full eclipse, and he wanted to travel because it was such a rare occurrence and he’s really into astronomy.

Ling put his eclipse glasses on that were “Pretty much welder lenses strapped to a piece of cardboard,” and stared at the sky, waiting for the magic to happen. People counted down as it got darker by the second. “It was awesome. It got really dark and you could see the moon over the sun,” said Ling. It grew silent as everybody stared in awe. It seemed like everybody was just holding their breath, amazed at what they were seeing. The birds stopped chirping and it got colder right away. The total eclipse happened at 1:06 p.m., and lasted only about 2 minutes.

When asked what the coolest part of the whole experience was, Ling replied, “Probably just the full eclipse… you could go online and look up pictures and stuff but it was different when you were actually there.”

The only change Ling would make about his experience is maybe just going to a bigger city in Missouri where more people cheering and counting down would have added to the excitement. Nothing really surprised Ling about the eclipse because he was already expecting everything that happened. “It was just kind of magical,” said Ling.