MACON, Ga. — Folks came to the Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park to watch the moon pass over the sun.
Zachary Dibois is a member of the Middle Georgia Astronomical Society. An organization through the Museum of Arts and Sciences. He came to the event to show kids and adults about the technology used to see into the sky.
"The great thing about it is it can guide itself to target. There's no place to visually look through the telescope, it connects to a tablet. Everything is done from a tablet, you find the object, tell it what you want to look at and it goes and finds it and displays it on the tablet for you," Dibois says.
Dibois says the kids were in awe and loved to see the smart telescope called a SeeStar S50 and what it can do. He says he has never been in a totality state and has only seen partial solar eclipses.
For other spectators, this was not their first time and even made shirts for the occasion, like Cathy Allen who came to the mounds to stare up into the sky.
"My friend Linda and I came to the last eclipse I think it was in 2017 and I had made shirts for that. And so, we decided we were coming again and we needed shirts to commemorate it," Allen said.
Sharon Turner is a director at the Jones County Senior Center. She told the seniors about the solar eclipse and some of them had never seen it before. She said this was the perfect opportunity to get the seniors outside and learn something fun.
But the ones who had the most fun were the kids. Kynlee Aaron and Ashton Brown love outer space and their grandma took them to the mounds to see the eclipse.
Part of the watch party included the kids learning about making solar eclipse box viewers, how an eclipse works about different solar eclipses. Aaron was about to go home with the Solar Eclipse Junior Badge to solidify that she knows about eclipses.
"I had to finish and I had to tell them what I learned, then I wrote it in the book and told them and that's how I got my badge," Aaron said.