Brandon Drenon
Reporting from Washington DC

Darcy Howard knows a thing or two about solar eclipses. Before today, she told the BBC she’s seen five of them.

We caught up with Darcy earlier, before the eclipse happened. And we’ve just spoken to her again to see how it went.

She drove hundreds of miles to a friend’s farm in Missouri to make sure she was in the path of totality.

“I’ve seen two totals, one annular, and two partials.. And each one has its own fingerprint,” Darcy says after the eclipse, employing the language of an astronomer mixed with the coolness of a tattoo artist.

The 70-year-old is a member of the Central
Arkansas Astronomical Society, a Nasa Partner Eclipse ambassador, and a woman who says she looks to space when she wants to know “all’s right with the world”.

“It’s part of our life – the cycle of nature. You can see the stars. They’re always there. They’ve been our timekeepers,” she says.

The fingerprint brought by today’s eclipse will leave as lasting of an impression on Darcy as each before.

It was the shadows becoming “unnatural”, “the strange effects”, “the colours”, “the sense of other-worldliness”. But it was also the people.

“We had seniors. We had working-age adults. We had
teachers. We had medical workers. We had people from all walks of life who came,” Darcy says.