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THROWIN’ SHADE
Linguistics senior Kai Barclay smiles while viewing the eclipse on the South Oval Aug. 21.
Students skip class to experience rare solar eclipse
D
arren Midkiff put over 2,000 miles on his Ford Escape in the past week. The first chunk of mileage came from his 20-hour drive back to Oklahoma after working at NASA in Washington, D.C. for the past eight months. A roadtrip to and from a small town in Nebraska to view the total eclipse tacked on the last several hundred miles. The computer engineering junior and five of his friends loaded into two cars to make the six hour drive to Beatrice, Nebraska, on Sunday, Aug. 20. Beatrice was in the path of totality, meaning those in the area would be able to see the full solar eclipse. “We had been planning this for about a month,” Midkiff said. “I told some of them that I wanted to go and see the eclipse and asked who wanted to come with.” The group and their plan to skip the first official day of classes at OU was one of many different efforts put forth by the OU community to catch a glimpse of the eclipse.
K AYLA BRANCH • @K AYLA _BRANCH For those who stayed on campus, where there was about 82 percent sun coverage, there were multiple watch parties hosted by the university and student groups such as Lunar Sooners, an astronomy outreach club. The eclipse watch party was the largest event the club has ever hosted, said Evan Rich, a graduate student in the physics and astronomy department and president of Lunar Sooners. “We hosted a smaller partial eclipse watch party in 2015 with about 200 to 300 people, but there is no telling how many people were out here watching this eclipse,” Rich said. “Total and partial eclipses are pretty rare, and this one was just really well publicized.” Total eclipses and partial eclipses differ by the amount of sun that becomes covered by the moon, Rich said. Partial eclipses have a slight dimming effect, but total eclipses cause the sky to become dark and the temperature to drop, he said. The watch party took place on the South Oval and gave
community members the opportunity to see the movement of the moon through solar eclipse glasses, special telescopes and pinhole viewers, Rich said. By the time of peak coverage in Norman, roughly a thousand people crowded the South Oval, passing eclipse glasses between friends and strangers alike. In Beatrice, hotels and campgrounds were booked full of people from places like Ohio, Montana and Canada, all waiting to see the moment of totality, said Mark Thiel, an aviation junior who also went on the trip. The group camped out on Sunday night and spent the f o l l ow i n g m o r n i n g w i t h a n eclipse-chasing family and their son Apollo, sharing Moon Pies and Milky Ways as totality drew near, Midkiff said. “It was appropriate that we me et Ap ollo while w e w ere there for the eclipse,” Midkiff said. “There was a group of people with a telescope that had a special lens and a guy who was an amateur astronomer, so we talked with him. Then totality
“It got dark as night, and right before totality, the entire sky looked like a sunset, and then suddenly there was a black sun in the sky with a glow around it for two-and-a-half minutes.” DARREN MIDKIFF, COMPUTER ENGINEERING JUNIOR
happened, and we looked at it and it was really amazing. It got dark as night, and right before totality, the entire sky looked like a sunset, and then suddenly there was a black sun in the sky with a glow around it for twoand-a-half minutes.” Thiel said totality was one of the strangest things he had ever experienced and the two minutes of darkness were worth the drive and skipping the first day of class. “It’s strange because you can look up into the sky and just not see the sun,” Thiel said. “The sun didn’t look all that different until the very last moment when totality happened, and then it was
just dark and everyone stopped and marveled at what it was like to be in the middle of the day and to have the sky just be dark.” Midkiff and his friends headed back to Norman after the eclipse was over to face classes and homework with a natural phenomenon under their belts. “It was a great time to see thousands of people get together and marvel at the eclipse and to geek out about something so cool,” Thiel said. Kayla Branch
kaylabranch@ou.edu
COURTESY OF TABEN MALIK
The solar eclipse Aug. 21. This was the first total solar eclipse visible coast to coast in the United States in 99 years.
Rep. Tom Cole holds town hall in Norman Constituents question congressman about Trump, health care NICK HAZELRIGG @nickhazelrigg
U.S. Representative Tom Cole, R-Oklahoma, held a town hall meeting Tuesday night where his constituents hammered him with questions on topics from foreign policy to climate change, but one topic took up most of the oxygen.
Health care dominated the conversation at the National Weather Center in Norman as Cole defended his vote in favor of the Republican Party’s health care plan. Audience members booed at the mention of the proposed Republican health care bills, which died in the Senate in July. Cole blamed the failure on Republicans in the Senate, saying senators’ desire to avoid the issue led to the effort’s “spectacular flameout.” “There were frankly too many senators who wanted the bill to
fail in the House and didn’t do anything to help,” Cole said. Cole faced a passionate crowd that overwhelmingly disapproved of the Republican attempt to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. “I feel like his attitude about health care is very flippant. He doesn’t seem to take it as seriously as I would like him to,” said Taryn Chubb, a constituent from Ada. “I believe it is a basic human right, not something that we play with or something that we talk about in terms that are jovial.”
At one point, constituents demanded to know what kind of health care Cole had, and yelled in favor of universal health care. In response, Cole said he was skeptical of the Congressional Budget Office’s forecast that 22 million would lose health coverage should the ACA be repealed. Cole’s criticism of the CBO’s health care score ranged from s ay i n g i t w a s “ m i s l e a d i n g ” to saying it could be “enormously off.” The CBO had millions of Americans losing coverage in every iteration of the Republicans’ health care
legislation this year. “We did a lousy job messaging,” Cole said of the Republican efforts to pass the bill. Cole broke from Trump several times during the evening and said he makes it clear when he disagrees with the president. Cole espoused a starkly different opinion on climate change than Trump’s administration.
see COLE page 3