We rolled into Doniphan, Missouri about two hours before the April 8 eclipse shadow darkened the highway town of about 2,000 people. We found an empty parking lot behind the Doniphan Baptist Church and waited for the shadow. The sky was spring blue, with sprigs of altocumulus clouds the only visible threats to photographic clarity.

Michelina, my wife, ran the still camera, a Pentax K-70 that served me admirably during the Aug. 2017 eclipse seen from a Denny’s Restaurant parking lot in Carbondale, Illinois. During this eclipse, I used a SeeStar S50 to shoot the event. About an hour before the eclipse began, a fellow from Huntsville, Alabama rolled up and asked if we were on the center line of the eclipse path. “Pretty much,” I told Bern Berthour, so Bern parked his car near ours.

WAITING

We traveled south from Oshkosh, Wisconsin on April 4, settling in at a Hampton Suites south of St. Louis. During the days before the eclipse, I religiously checked locations with the best chances for clear skies on April 8. We filled the time by exploring the last true Italian neighborhood in America. Known as “The Hill,” the St. Louis neighborhood is home to fine Italian cuisine, taste-bombing gelato, bocci ball halls and immaculate old homes that have passed from generation to generation. It is also home to St. Ambrose Church, the spiritual center of the community and a building that was rebuilt brick-by-brick by the residents a century ago. A fire leveled the original church in 1921; it took five years to rebuild. Personally, besides the eclipse, spending hours within the church was a profound experience. I also discovered, happily, that a Saint exists for astronomers. His name was Dominic.

ELIZABETH STREET

Two baseball hall of famers grew up across the street from one another on The Hill. Yogi Berra, a catcher who helped the New York Yankees win 10 World Series championships–no player ever won more–and catcher Joe Garagiola, who played for four teams over nine seasons. Garagiola won a World Series in 1946 with the St. Louis Cardinals. He later became a broadcaster, earning baseball hall of fame honors for his skills behind the microphone.

Jack Buck, familiar to the Baby Boom generation for broadcasting professional football alongside John Madden, and to St. Louis Cardinal fans for his radio calls of their games, grew up two streets over from Berra and Garagiola.

THE ECLIPSE

It doesn’t take long for changes to occur under an eclipsed sun. The temperature was near 80 degrees when the eclipse began over Doniphan. As the sky sank into a dimming haze, Doniphans in lawn chairs soaked in the unusual sky. By the time totality arrived about 75 minutes later, it was 15 degrees cooler, the birds were in the trees roosting, dogs were barking everywhere and it was black as pine tar. In August 2017, watching that eclipse from Carbondale, it got dark but not Doniphan dark.

I made a mistake in setting up the Pentax camera. Instead of shortening the exposure time to 1/500th of a second so we could capture the solar prominences flaring in the sun’s atmosphere, I left the exposure at 1/100th of a second. That accented the sun’s atmosphere, but the flares were a bit blurry. Fortunately, an astronomical colleague of mine, Nazmus Nasir, posted one of his fine eclipse photos on Cloudynights.com, an astronomical community. Thank you, Nazmus, for sharing your fine, prominence-detailing photo of the end of the eclipse.

DON’T FORGET TO LOOK UP

The total eclipse lasted more than four minutes. Preoccupied with photography and looking around in marvel at how dark it was, I almost forgot to look up at the eclipsed sun. Gazing at a totally eclipsed sun is a deep-rooted experience, drawing emotions out of human beings that they didn’t know they had. It changes you in a mysterious, spiritual way. I felt lucky to be there with my wife of 16 years, Michelina, and Bern, somebody I knew for about 16 minutes.

There was a large arching prominence on the bottom, south side of the sun. While looking up, I saw a reddishness on that part of the sun. The prominence extended for tens of thousands of miles up into the sun’s photosphere, and I was amazed that I could pick that up with my eyes alone. Bern, who only brought eclipse glasses and his own eyes, announced that totality was about to end. That sent me scurrying to the SeeStar to slap the solar filter back over the lens. Michelina snapped a series of photos as the eclipsed ended.

LIGHT RETURNS

As day reemerged, so did faraway sounds of humans released from the spell of the shadow. We took a few more photos, packed up, said so long to Bern and began our long trip back to St. Louis. It took 2.5 hours to drive from St. Louis to Doniphan. It took 4.5 hours to make it back to our hotel. It was a long stop-and-start slog in eclipse-triggered traffic jams. Then there was the GPS-induced horror detour down Cash Lane, which led us on a wild, serpentine drive up and down backwoods Ozark roads at too-fast speeds on too-steep, two-lane roads–sometimes there was a center line, sometime there wasn’t–which had me praying to St. Dominic, begging that this astronomy trip would not be my last.

Saint Dominic answered. Eventually, after prolonged stretches of white-knuckled navigation around hairpin turns, we rediscovered I55 north. We left our hotel that morning at 7 a.m. We pulled back into the parking lot at 7:30 p.m. It had been a day to remember.

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Boston-based Nazmus Nasir has a website at http://Naztronomy.com and a YouTube channel at http://YouTube.com/Naztronomy