Colorado's Pikes Peak Is an Eclipse Hot Spot (for 2045)

04.04.2024 - 00:09 / atlasobscura.com

Eclipse chasers hope for clear skies, so here’s hoping for a good forecast for Monday, April 8. But if you are the kind of person who likes to plan way ahead, consider coming to the Mountain West in 21 years and four months. Colorado is known for more than 300 days of sunshine, and the August 2045 total eclipse crosses most of the state.

The next meeting of Sun and Moon over the United States parallels the 1878 eclipse, which crossed the Rocky Mountains when Colorado was a brand-new state (the Centennial State was admitted into the Union in 1876) and mountain communities were still populated mostly by silver and gold miners. Studying the eclipse across a young and modernizing America gave our scientists great credibility, as the Colorado author David Baron beautifully accounts in his 2017 book American Eclipse. But it also put Colorado firmly on the map.

Astronomers calculated that the 1878 eclipse would run down the Rockies, from Wyoming Territory through Colorado and into Texas. Colorado was the best place to visit, because it had the greatest number of established cities. What’s more, Colorado’s clear skies and thin atmosphere (thanks to its high elevation above sea level) would provide a clear view of the inner solar system, helping astronomers determine whether there was a long-hypothesized planet between Mercury and the Sun. The purported planet, nicknamed Vulcan, would only be visible during a solar eclipse—and by 1878 telescopes were powerful enough, and scientific observation was careful enough, to finally find it, if it existed.

Burgeoning railroad towns and mining outposts saw dollar signs in the celestial event; the Pennsylvania Railroad Company even gave professional astronomers half-price train tickets to Denver, via Chicago or St. Louis.

Scientists and tourists fanned out across the Front Range. Some scientists went to Denver, especially the neighborhood of Cherry Creek. Astronomer Asaph Hall, who discovered the moons of Mars in 1877, brought an expedition to the plains town of La Junta.

Tourists from as far as Europe flocked to Garden of the Gods, in Colorado Springs, where tents were erected for shade and people could watch the eclipse after paying a 25-cent admission fee, according to History Colorado.

One group of astronomers from the Naval Observatory and West Point went to the mining town of Central City, and observed the eclipse from the Teller House hotel, which is now a restaurant in a casino town. Astronomers from St. Louis went to Idaho Springs, not far from Central City. Samuel Pierpont Langley, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, led an expedition with his brother John Langley and the meteorologist Cleveland Abbe to the summit of Pikes Peak. People and pack