Crowds flock to Grand Vue Park in Moundsville to see solar eclipse

Marshall County middle school students came to Grand Vue Park’s shelters, where SMART Centre Market owner Robert Strong had set up numerous stations to enable students to better appreciate the eclipse, including a telescope projecting to a screen.

Strong said the event had been years in the making, and that he had been trying to coordinate with Marshall County Schools for months leading up to the eclipse.

“We’ve been putting this together for months,” Strong said. “To get the cameras, and telescopes and all that to talk to this TV set. To make all the models, and do the math — if you’re to check the math, it’s out to multiple decimal places, everywhere.

“We’ve been doing star watch and astronomy events since 1986, so I’ve had a little background with this,” Strong said. “When I saw, three years ago, that we were going to get an eclipse with 83 percent coverage for, I started calling around to schools,” Strong said. “It has worked out really nice. The kids are having fun, being safe, we’ve got enough activities. … If it had rained out, we’d still have things to do.”

Strong joked that he and his wife, Libby Strong, had checked the prices for the more than 400 sets of eclipse glasses handed out to those in attendance, and were sitting on more than a third of a million dollars as of Monday morning.

Also assisting the students was Michael Borkoski, a student at The Linsly School and an aspiring astrophotographer, who had a specialized camera set up to take photos of the eclipse, which he showed students milling about, waiting for totality.

“Robert Strong helped me out a lot in helping me do this, so I thought I’d repay the favor,”Borkoski said. “About two years ago, he helped me pick out my first telescope, told me how to use it, and he helped me pick out this one. … I’d like to get a Ph.D. in astrophysics because looking through a camera, it looks pretty, but the real interesting part is the physics behind it.”

From Moundsville Middle School, science teacher Jaime Pettit said the eclipse provided an excellent teaching aid for the new students.

“This has not happened in 38 years — it’s the first time in my lifetime, so the kids are really lucky to experience this, and it won’t happen again until 2024, when they’ll be in college,” Pettit said. “The first course I’m going to start teaching this year is planetary science, so we’re going to start learning about the moon and the effects the sun and moon have on the earth, so this is good. All morning long, in all my science classes, we did a folder on the eclipse, and we watched a ten minute video that NASA put out about it, so they’re all excited.”

“This absolutely fits into the content standards for the sixth grade. We targeted sixth-graders because of that,” added curriculum director Woody Yoder. “And the fact that, at sixth grade, they’re coming together as middle schoolers. This allows them to have an event where they come together for the first time. All those feeder schools are coming together, so that really worked out.”

Students gathered at Grand Vue with special eclipse glasses to see the event, while various stations provided modeled simulations of the effects of the eclipse on the earth, as well as pinhole viewing stations and other demonstrations.

“I thought that it was going to be a total eclipse, but when I looked at it, I thought it was crazy,”student Marra Tharp said. “Afterwards, I saw that it was going to be only 85 percent, and got kind of disappointed, but I’m happy anyway. It was very weird.”

Visiting from Oregon on unrelated family matters, Michelle and Teegan Rork hoped to take the time to see both the eclipse, and its effect on local wildlife. As the totality of the eclipse approached, the dimming light brought out crickets and birds chirping.

“We live in a place that’s all about the nature, so we’re interested in seeing how the birds respond,” Michelle Rork said. “It’s getting a little darker, and the birds behave differently. They’ll think it’s night, and start chirping. Even though we left Oregon, we couldn’t miss the opportunity.”