York County looks to the sky as eclipse overshadows the day

The clouds parted at about 1:20 p.m. and Jeri Jones proclaimed to the gathering in the York County church parking lot, "There it is."

The solar eclipse was just beginning. A crowd gathered in the parking of St. John's Blymire's United Church of Christ just outside Dallastown looked through Jones' telescope and marveled at, for at least today, the greatest show in the cosmos.

Check out all the eclipse coverage: 

• Watch live video of the eclipse here
• Here's the answers to 38 eclipse questions you didn't know you had. 
• How are York County schools handling eclipse day safety?
• Late to the party? Here's the procrastinator's guide to the viewing the solar eclipse

"That's so cool," said Linda King, who drove to the church from her home in Red Lion to view the eclipse. She had a pair of eclipse glasses that she bought at Walmart about month ago, just before the retailer ran out of the items. She marveled that they really worked. "When you put these on, you can't see a darn thing," she said.

Faith Boyer, who came to the viewing with her mother, Sheila, watched the eclipse through a pinhole camera fashioned from a cardboard box that began its life containing duct tape. She had her back to the sun, the image protected on a piece of white paper taped to the inside of the box. She had her head in the box.

"This is the old school way of doing this," she said.

It may have been old-school, and the image on the paper was tiny, but she could see it.

"It actually works," her mother marveled.

One woman said, as the eclipse proceeded, "It looks like somebody took a bite out of the sun."

Which is kind of appropriate, when you consider ancient beliefs considering solar eclipses. The Chinese believed eclipses were caused by a dragon eating the sun. The Vietnamese believed a large frog devoured the sun. And those aren't the weirdest beliefs. The Arapaho Plains Indians believed the sun and the moon were siblings - brother sun and sister moon - and were alarmed about the incestuous relationship between the two. The Mayans believed solar eclipses signaled the end of the world and that the disruption would reanimate the spirits of the dead who would then feed on the living - kind of like a ancient version of "The Walking Dead."

Of course, we know a lot more about celestial mechanics now.

As the moon continued to obscure the sun, a few dozen people lined up to view it through Jones' 10-inch telescope equipped with a solar filter. He also had a four-inch telescope projecting the image onto a piece of paper on a clipboard and a pair of binoculars mounted in a copy-paper box projecting the eclipse onto a piece of paper taped to the bottom of the box.

Jerry Kern fashioned his own viewer from a shoe box, an old-school pinhole camera, with a twist. The pinhole would project the image onto a piece of cardboard mounted at a 45-degree angle at the back of the camera. He could then view the image through a port cut in the box's top, using a magnifying glass to enlarge it. "It works," said Kern, who was watching the eclipse with his wife of 62 years, Marilyn.

A bicyclist named Joe Stafford examined his device. His own invention, fashioned from a Trader Joe's Italian Roast coffee can, wasn't working so well. "It worked when I was kid," he said. "I must be doing something wrong."

As the eclipse proceeded, those gathered to view it took breaks in the church hall, where they could snack on Cosmic Brownies, Moon Pies and Sun Chips. (There was a theme.)

The closer it got to the maximum coverage of the sun - the eclipse was 79 percent here, not totality, as Jones was saying - the crowd grew to more than 100, the line to take a peak at he eclipse snaking across the church parking lot.

The moment arrived at 2:40 p.m. - maximum.

The sun, though, at the time, was obscured by a thick cloud. 

"It'll come back in a minute," Jones reassured the gathering.

As the seconds ticked by, it became obvious. "We're going to miss the maximum," Jones said.

Jones turned to the crowd and said, "Everybody wave your arms and get that cloud moving."

Someone shouted, "Does that work?"

It was worth a try, Jones said.

You could see just about the maximum, spying a sliver of sun through the thin edges of the cloud. As the cloud scudded by, Jones said, "There it is, right there."

By then, Jones said, the maximum visible from here had passed and now the moon was starting to slide off the sun.

The crowd thinned appreciably after the peak came and passed. About half the crowd remained about 20 minutes after the maximum and grew smaller as the sun grew larger.

"I expected that," Jones said. "But the show isn't over."

The high point had passed and half an hour after the peak - nearly an hour before the eclipse was complete - the crowd was gone.