█ █ █ █ Hey, everybody, and welcome to Kentucky Life.

I'm your host, Chip Polston.

Now, this is a site that may be recognizable to a lot of you.

It's the iconic floodwall in Downtown Paducah.

It's our first trip here since April 8th of 2024, and it was so much more crowded then.

That's when Paducah found itself in the middle of an iconic event.

This was going to be one of the cities in Kentucky that was going to experience a total solar eclipse.

Now, I had never experienced totality.

I'd seen one a few years back and it got to like 80% totality.

And I'll be honest, I wasn't too impressed.

So as we got in the car that morning and headed here to the waterfront, my expectations were in check, but I was anxious to see just what all the hype was about.

█ █ █ █ So we are in the car heading out of the hotel, it's an overcast morning, but we are heading downtown to Paducah with maybe tens of thousands of some of our closest friends to check out the solar eclipse.

I've never seen one, can't wait to see what it's all about.

So Paducah is one of the places in Kentucky where we are going to have, from what I understand, for about a minute and a half, totality.

So everything's going to be covered up, and we're going to get, what I've read about and heard from other people who've experienced eclipses before, where not only do you get the darkness but the temperature goes down.

You start to hear insects and birds, and dogs get excited.

I've just never seen anything like that.

But everybody I know who has seen it has come away from it saying it's like this spiritual experience.

It's this really neat thing and I can't wait to check it out.

█ █ █ █ Total eclipse is pretty straightforward.

I like to say there's always a solar eclipse because you take the sunlight and put the moon in front of it, and you'll get a shadow of the moon.

And if that shadow of the moon happens to land somewhere on the earth, which is not very often, you've got a solar eclipse.

From the earth's point of view, the moon has to pass directly in front of the sun.

That can only happen obviously during a new moon, but it can also only happen when the planes of the moon's orbit around the earth and the earth's orbit around the sun intercept.

That only happens twice a year.

It's called eclipse seasons.

It also can only happen when the moon is a little bit larger than normal because it's a little closer and the sun's a little smaller than normal because it's further away.

So certain times of the year, you just simply can't get a solar eclipse.

That's why they're so relatively rare, about once per year on average somewhere on the earth.

This is Susan Edwards with the Rock Shop here in Paducah.

Susan, thanks so much for letting us be in on such a great day today.

Oh, it's my pleasure.

Thank you for coming.

So the mechanics of what's going to happen today.

Walk us through what the eclipse is going to be like.

Well, it's an experience.

So I really can't tell you what it's going to be for you because every single person has a different experience to it.

But in terms of the mechanics today, we've got our street festival, X Marks the Spot, starting at 10:00, and running until 4 o'clock.

But all of us will shut down during the eclipse to allow everybody to experience the eclipse.

So I've never seen one before.

What am I in for today?

What should I expect?

Well, of course, everybody's going to be different.

So I can speak to my experience back in 2017.

I grew up not being much of a crier.

That wasn't something we did in our household.

So it was like no cry.

And so I'm not a real emotional person about things like that.

And I watched the eclipse on the roof.

And when totality hit, I was literally screaming and crying.

And I'm like, "What am I doing?"

I mean, it was so out of the blue and so emotional for me.

I can't explain why, but there's just this sort of otherworldly power that you see and the power of the cosmos.

it may not be the same for you.

I hope it is because it was a truly interesting experience.

Once in a lifetime, and now, I get to do it again today.

Tell me about Paducah.

Tell me about what's going on right outside the doors of your shop here, and how you all have gotten ready for this big moment.

Well, of course, I knew that it was coming.

And in 2017, I had a psychic fear, and there really wasn't anything going on downtown, just a lot of visitors.

And so this time around, I said to the city and some of the other community leaders, "We're gonna have a lot of people here because it's X Marks the Spot."

And whether we put out porta potties and something for them fun to do or not, they're going to be here.

So let's put on some festival.

So I came up with the idea, and everybody thought that was a great idea, and here it is.

So really what this means to Paducah to kind of be able to show off the downtown area here.

What is an event like this mean to a town like Paducah?

Well, one of the reasons that we wanted to do the event was to showcase Downtown Paducah but all of Paducah.

You know, Paducah is a UNESCO creative city, and there's only a handful of us in the entire world.

And so, I mean, we have so many wonderful eclectic shops down here.

Paducah is one of the few remaining riverfront towns that's still so vital.

We have the National Quilt Museum.

Right.

We have other museums that are just as special, and so we wanted to show off.

Well, there's two types of eclipse, mostly, the partial and the total.

And I like to tell people that you see a partial eclipse with the glasses, of course, you experience a total eclipse.

It's just something that's well worth the trip.

It's a life-changing experience for most people.

We had one go through Bowling Green in 2017, and people afterwards were like, "Wow, I didn't expect to be that good."

The sun is not like most people think a perfectly round sphere.

It bulges at the equator a little bit.

We call it oblateness because it rotates just like the earth bulges at the equator because of its rotation.

However, the earth rotates as a solid object once every 24 hours.

The sun rotates at different speeds, at different latitudes as a ball of gas.

The sun also has this 11-year cycle of magnetic activity moving the sunspots around from the equator to the poles and back again, and that causes all these flows underneath the surface, which in turn cause ripples on the surface of the sun.

So at any given time, the exact shape of the sun will be slightly different than it was the previous day or the previous year.

And the idea of SunSketcher was to catch a photo or snapshot, if you like, of the sun at some stage in its evolution.

So with SunSketcher, I think, a big part of it is, one, this project is so much bigger than any of us.

Like, you know, a school project that affects your grades, maybe your partner's grades, and then you never think about it again.

With SunSketcher, I mean, this is a NASA funded project.

We are working very closely with big corporations such as SciStarter.

And the research that we're doing impacts a lot of heliophysics science, and that's so much bigger than any one of us.

So for us to work together as a team to help advance science is... it's a crazy thought when you're 21 and you're working on something this big.

It's hard to wrap your head around.

Simply put, the app knows where the phone is, has a GPS locator on the phone to calculate exactly when the so-called second and third contacts that just before totality and just at the end of totality times will be, the times when the Baily's beads will show up and automatically programs the phone's camera to take a series of rapid images around those times to capture the beads as they are appearing and disappearing.

Early on, we recognized that one phone is not going to do it, we need lots of phones.

And we didn't want two people taking pictures from the same place, simply duplicate data.

So we deliberately adjust the exact time of each individual's phone by a few milliseconds either way so that every single data input is, in fact, unique.

By combining all this, yes, we'll get our original idea of a nice movie of the sun, but more importantly by comparing the timing of the beads based on what we think it should be, based on our best guess model of the solar surface and comparing that to what they actually were, we can make adjustments to the shape of the sun and learn what it truly is.

It's been really exciting to be able, especially from the design perspective and on the app, especially, it's kind of like the thing that I think was most exciting to be able to have an app that I worked on to make the design and make it look good and then have it actually released to 30-something thousand people that actually used it, saw it on the 8th, and that's work that I worked on that 30,000 people just saw, and that's been really, really exciting.

█ █ █ █ This is Russell Orr.

He's with the Inland Waterways Museum here in Paducah that sits right on the riverfront.

Russell, thanks so much for having us here.

We're delighted to have you.

The mechanics of what's going to happen today, walk me through how the eclipse is going to occur.

So there are two points during the earth's orbit when an eclipse is likely, because the moon does not orbit the earth in a straight line.

It's at a slight tilt.

So what that means is there are two places where the moon's orbit crosses path with where the earth orbits the sun.

That plane is called the ecliptic.

And if you're looking at the eclipse, you wait for the moon to be on the ecliptic.

The moon, of course, is about a quarter of the size of the earth, and the sun is over 100 times the diameter of the earth.

But because the moon's so much closer, they appear just the same size.

It's just like if I were to hold my hand in front of your face there's a spot where I can hold it where it's the same size.

The moon's doing the same thing to the earth.

Thinking back, you know, we've known for a long time that this was going to happen.

But hundreds of years ago, before really astronomy sciences existed, somebody out in wherever they were, all of a sudden in the middle of the day, the sun disappears and there's this bright ring, it had to be terrifying for people.

I'm sure that it was.

Although, I have actually seen and read ancient Chinese texts where it talks about how, "Oh, for the moon to be eclipsed is about a small matter, now the sun is eclipsed, how bad it is!"

Which is fascinating when you think about it because when there's a lunar eclipse, everybody can see it, so you see more of them.

But very few people see solar eclipses, even though there are multiple solar and lunar eclipses per year, up to seven, in fact.

They just don't always happen over a populated area.

And they don't always happen when lots of people find it convenient to see it.

So we're in for a real treat.

█ █ █ █ Inclusivity, in general, means that everybody is part of something, right?

And in science, we want everybody to be able to do science, to learn science, and to experience science, to appreciate science.

In the case of an eclipse, it's something that happens visually.

So a lot of people talk about the eclipse glasses and seeing the eclipse.

But people who have some limitations in their sight, they may perceive a change in temperature when the eclipse is very, very dark, but they cannot experience it.

So in a way they may feel excluded in a way.

About 10 years ago, I wrote a profile for a non-profit organization called Ciencia Puerto Rico.

And the profile was for Dr. Wanda Diaz-Merced.

She's an astrophysicist.

She was doing her PhD at the time.

And she was doing research on converting astronomical data into sound, since she's blind.

So she needs to use that information converted in such a way that she can analyze the data.

And it is through that connection she was working on this project with [Allison Villarela and Sully Hyman] to develop some sort of a device that can convert sunlight into something she could hear.

It's pointed at the light and hear the sound.

It's really easy.

The device has a light detector and a little minicomputer inside, an Arduino.

It essentially converts the brightness of the light into music.

So when you have full sunlight, it's going to be a flute high-pitched, and then it keeps lowering the pitch, lowering the pitch.

Then you hit the clarinet, which are the little bit darker, lower the pitch, lower the pitch, and then you have some clicks.

And right at that point it's going to be the darkest.

So that will be the brightness of this light, and we're going to simulate the moon going between the sun and the earth.

And you can hear how the pitch is going to change.

Right now, we're in clarinet mode because this light is not very bright.

Outside, it will be in the flute area.

So we have our eclipse.

[beeping] [beeping fades out] And you hear it getting lower pitched.

[low pitch beeping] [rattling] And that will represent the darkest part.

[rattling continues] And then the moon eventually goes away.

[beeping] And then, we have back to the original sound that you should be hearing before the eclipse.

For most people, just listening to the sound and how the sound changes as the light brightness changes, that provides people who are blind or who have visual impairments a way to experience something like an eclipse.

So in 2017, they did a pilot and that's how I sort of became involved.

There were about three devices, and two of them were here in Kentucky.

One was at the Kentucky School for the Blind, one was here.

And I was the connection through Dr. Diaz-Merced to bring some of these here.

And there were other scientists who had the devices in the path of totality.

Here in Morehead, it was 97%.

And so they wanted to collect data from different points and see whether the device will actually work, and it did.

If you have the right accommodations, the right technology, the right tools, you may think, "Well, if somebody's doing astronomy and looking through telescopes, they need to have sight."

They don't have to, right?

There's a number of people with disabilities that can succeed in any career, given the proper technology.

And this is a nice example of that.

█ █ █ █ Is it going to be dark?

I don't know if it's going to be totally dark or not, but brownish, brownish maybe.

The last eclipse, we had 99% totality.

So this would be new for us to be able to see the whole thing, get that ring of fire, hopefully.

It'll be fun to watch other people's reaction.

Wonder if it'll be emotional.

I don't know.

Because last time I just set up in my backyard, but then the clouds rolled in, so I had to throw it all in my car and I was like driving around town looking out the window, trying to find where the clouds weren't.

And so I ended up just in a parking lot, with me and another guy.

So it'd be fun to kind of share it with a whole crowd of people.

Yeah.

So, Charlotte, tell me what you're doing here today.

Why did you come all the way to Kentucky?

Because this is my dad's, on his bucket list, and we wanted to do it.

Because in North Carolina, it's a long time until the real solar eclipse.

And it's in Alaska, so we saw the totality.

We were going to Little Rock, that was five hours away.

But my mom didn't want me to go drive five hours away.

So when we saw Paducah, Kentucky, that's two hours away from Nashville, Tennessee, we decided to go here, instead of five-hour Litter Rock.

So what do you think it's gonna look like?

Tell me what you think it's gonna to look like.

So the sky's gonna definitely be dark, and the animals are gonna be tricked.

They're gonna be tricked into what?

Thinking it's nighttime, like the crickets are gonna come out, and there's like, "Yay, it's nighttime."

But it's actually daytime.

The moon is like coming up and blocking the sun, and then the sun's gonna be mad.

Wow.

So do you think you're gonna get happy?

Are you gonna get excited?

How do you think you're gonna feel when it happens?

Excited because I want to see the solar eclipse with my dad and spend time with him.

█ █ █ █ All right, we're about 15 minutes from totality right now.

We just got a little bit of a sliver of the sun that we see so far.

Got my eclipse-survival pack ready to go, got my sun-kissed, my Sun chips, my Moon pies.

I've even got my Paducah Sun ready to go.

It's almost showtime.

█ █ █ █ All right, so we're about a minute away.

It is a very dusky sunlight.

It really is amazing to see there is a tiny sliver of the sun that's showing right now.

And the breeze, we're feeling the breeze that people told us would start to pick up just as it goes.

This is one of the strangest things I've literally ever seen in my entire life.

Signs are super bright.

The whole sky is dark.

It almost looks like a storm is getting ready to come through.

And it's not even totality yet.

This is absolutely... amazing.

Almost there.

█ █ █ █ It's almost there.

█ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ A little more.

█ █ █ █ Almost ther-- Oh, my God.

█ █ █ █ Look at the dusk.

Look at the dusk on the horizon.

█ █ █ █ Whoo!

Look at the ring of fire.

Oh, my gosh.

█ █ █ █ The stars are out.

It looks like sunrise on the horizon.

There's a ring of fire around this.

I can't get over it.

█ █ █ █ Do you see that?

Wow.

Wow, unbelievable.

█ █ █ █ So when I came here to Paducah to cover this eclipse with our crew, we met people literally from all across the globe.

I couldn't understand why people had traveled and came here for something that was only gonna last a minute and a half or so.

Well, now that I've experienced my first solar eclipse, oh, I totally get it.

I totally understand why they did.

It was an amazing moment, not only for me, but my new friend, Charlotte, she had an amazing time as well.

It was amazing.

When we saw that light, it was like coming to an end, and then all of a sudden just [pitch dark], like it was like so dark and it was so amazing.

My dad has been my best friend for a while, and this is the best moment to spend time with my family.

█ █ █ █ So did you pick up on the fact that I was a little blown away by the eclipse?

Listen, it turned out to be one of those things in my life that far exceeded the hype.

I had literally never seen anything like it.

And just being here today and remembering that feeling really is pretty amazing.

We hope you've enjoyed this look back at the event.

And if we have you excited about checking out another total solar eclipse in Kentucky, be sure to put it on your calendar.

It'll be on October 17th in the year 2153.

Now if you've liked our show, be sure to like the Kentucky Life Facebook page or subscribe to the KET YouTube channel for more of what we like to call Kentucky Life Extras, where you'll have access to lots of other great videos.

Until next time, I'll leave you with this moment.

I'm Chip Polston cherishing this Kentucky life.

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