By MIKE COURSON
Great Bend Post
For about four minutes on Monday, a sliver of the United States got to experience darkness as the moon fully blocked out the sun. In Barton County, the moon covered only about 82 percent of the sun as part of the solar eclipse. That did not halt the fun at the Kansas Wetlands Education Center. Educator Mandy Kern said more than 350 visitors and approximately 30 volunteers participated in Monday's watch party.
"We did an activity called Globe Observer, it's a Citizen Science Project," she said. "With that, they wanted us to measure the temperature. An hour before max, we did it every 10 minutes. Thirty minutes before and after the max, we measured it every five minutes. We measured both the temperature and the light intensity."
The results were charted for all to see. The temperature peaked at 68.7 degrees at 1:15 p.m, then dropped to 60 degrees as the eclipse neared its max between 1:43 and 1:54 p.m. By 2:06, the temperature was back to 65.5 degrees.
Light intensity was measured by foot-candles (fc), a measurement that calculates the amount of light that reaches a surface area. Unobstructed sunlight is typically measured at 10,000 fc. Light conditions at KWEC peaked at 8,520 fc at 12:44 p.m, then dwindled to 819 fc at the eclipse max at 1:48. It rebounded to 1,966 fc just 11 minutes later, and was back to 8,709 fc by 3:09. Throughout the observation, the many observers visited the various other stations at the watch party.
"We never know what kind of crowds we're going to get at different events," Kern said. "When we put the effort into planning some of our stations, we definitely appreciate when people come out and participate."
The of totality for Monday's eclipse included major population centers like Dallas, Indianapolis, and Cleveland. More than 50,000 people watched from the darkness at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and another large crowd gathered to see the spectacle at Niagara Falls.