WGHP FOX highlights solar eclipse trip of Elon faculty members

The local FOX affiliate talked with Professor Tony Crider and Instructor Tim Martin before they traveled to be in the "path of totality" for the April 8 eclipse.

Elon faculty members Tony Crider and Tim Martin have plans to fully experience the April 8 eclipse from within the “path of totality,” and WGHP FOX8 caught up with them to learn about their plans before they hit the road.

Elon in the News logo with FOX8 headlineBeing in the path of totality allows viewers to experience a full eclipse, with the moon completely in front of the sun, with the sun creating a corona — a glowing halo — around the moon.

Crider, a professor of astrophysics, will be returning to his family’s farm in Ohio where he first set up telescopes to take in the stars. Martin, an instructor of physics, will join his son in Arkansas to view the eclipse, the 10th or 11th he’s viewed.

“I can describe what it looks like, you can watch it on TV, you can look at pictures, but you won’t understand it unless you’ve been in the path of totality,” Crider told FOX8’s Madison Forsey.

Martin recalls that the total eclipse in 2017 was an otherworldly experience. “To have that experience of something awe-inspiringly beautiful and very strange and bizarre and mysterious, it’s unlike anything else,” Martin told Forsey.

Watch the full segment to learn more.