The April 8, 2024, total solar eclipse will cross North America from the western coast of Central Mexico, just southeast of Mazatlan, to its exit in New Brunswick, Canada. The eclipse will pass over Cedar Creek Lake. Cedar Creek Lake is not exactly in the path of totality, but close to the path of totality at a 99.3% magnitude. 

Astronomers call the part of the eclipse that will pass over Cedar Creek a deep partial magnitude eclipse. Magnitude means the amount of the sun’s disk that the moon will hide. So, the magnitude for Cedar Creek Lake’s view of the eclipse is high. Eclipse viewers in the Cedar Creek Lake region will see 99.3% of the sun covered up by the moon. 

At Cedar Creek Lake, the mid-phase of the 2024 eclipse will last 4 minutes and 6 seconds. There are five phases to an eclipse. The phase that people most want to see is the mid-phase, when the maximum amount of the sun is covered up by the moon. The following times are for Gun Barrel City, Texas, right on the eastern shores of Cedar Creek Lake. 

The times will be slightly different for other parts of the shores at Cedar Creek Lake. The time format is hour/minutes/ seconds, 00.00.00. At Gun Barrel City, the mid-phase, what you want to see, will begin at 1:40:58 and last 4 minutes and 6 seconds. All five phases of this eclipse will begin at 12:23 p.m. and end at 3:03 p.m. at Gun Barrel City. 

A total solar eclipse comprises five phases. The first contact, or partial eclipse, is when it looks like the moon took a bite out of the sun. For the first hour and a half after first contact, the sky increasingly darkens. The second contact occurs just a few minutes before the total eclipse. 

Birds might quiet down, and some animals may change eating and sleeping habits at this point. The fourth and fifth contacts appear in reverse of the first and second contacts. It is not exactly true that an eclipse happens once in a lifetime. Every year, somewhere on earth, two to five partial eclipses occur per year. Total eclipses take place about every 18 months somewhere around the globe.

There are three types of eclipses, a total eclipse, partial eclipse, and annular eclipse. In a total eclipse, the sun is completely covered up by the moon. With a partial eclipse, part of the sun is covered up by the moon. Like if you took an Oreo cookie and pulled the top cookie partially off of the fondant filling. The white part would be the sun, and the top cookie would be the moon.

An annular eclipse is when the moon’s circumference is only very slightly smaller than the sun’s circumference, and there is a thin bright ring of light encircling the moon. We also call annular eclipses “ring of fire eclipses”. Annular and partial eclipses do not bring on total darkness like total eclipses.

One of the best seen total solar eclipses in the U.S. occurred in 1878 in Fort Worth, Texas, and it was the first recorded eclipse in Texas. The University of North Texas’ Portal to Texas History houses this event in pictures. Leonard Waldo, R.W. Wilson, J.K. Rees, W.H. Pulsifer, F.E. Seagrave, Alfred Freeman, and A.M. Britton, all astronomers, landed at the S.W. Lomax farm to view the eclipse with different models of telescopes. 

One hundred years earlier, in 1778, David Rittenhouse, an early American astronomer, published his record of the June 24, 1778, total solar eclipse in one of the first volumes of the American Philosophical Society. This total eclipse began in the Pacific Ocean and journeyed eastward, near Pennsylvania. Thomas Jefferson lived in Virginia at the time.

It was too cloudy for Jefferson to see that eclipse in Virginia, and he was terribly disappointed. Jefferson wrote a letter to Rittenhouse expressing his sadness. He asked Rittenhouse to please send him a timepiece that was more advanced and “for astronomical purposes only”. We keep on with our fascination of eclipses, as did ancient humans. 

Humans find eclipses fascinating and awe-inspiring, and have recorded eclipses that we know of since ancient Chinese scribes in Anyang wrote this about eclipses: “The sun has been eaten”. These scribes recorded eclipse dates on tortoise shells and oxen shoulder blades, called oracle bones, in 1226 B.C., 1198 B.C., 1172 B.C., 1163 B.C., and 1161 B.C. In today’s Syria, ancient Babylonians recorded solar eclipse on clay tablets, and their earliest recorded one was on May 3, 1375, B.C.