The last solar eclipse to impact metro Atlanta was in 1984

ATLANTA — One of the last solar eclipses to turn the skies dark across metro Atlanta was on May 30, 1984.

Andrew Young was mayor,  "Let's Hear It for the Boy," by Deniece Williams was No. 1 on the charts and Los Angeles was getting ready for the Summer Olympics.

Most of the Southeast was impacted by the annular eclipse that May day.

In an annular solar eclipse, the moon is too far from the Earth to block out the entire sun, leaving the sun peeking out over the moon's disk in a ring of fire, NASA says.

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"At maximum eclipse, (you see) a ring of light around the moon. That one you don't have the corona, you're left with a ring of light," said David Dundee, an astronomer at the Tellus Science Museum in Cartersville.

A rare "diamond necklace" effect was noticed as dots of sunlight appeared to shine through valleys on the moon's surface, the National Weather Service said.

This is different that the total solar eclipse expected Monday, where the moon will completely cover the sun and the sun's tenuous atmosphere -- the corona -- can be seen, NASA says.

Across the metro, about 99.7 percent of the sun's surface was covered. Street lights came on as skies began to darken some 20 minutes after noon, the New York Times reported.

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Much of the eclipse’s path paralleled Interstate 85 that day throughout the southeast.

Because of the potential danger, some schools in Atlanta kept the children indoors during the eclipse, where it was viewed on television, the Times reported.

The 1984 eclipse began 4,100 miles in the Pacific west of Ecuador at about 9:54 a.m. and raced eastward across Mexico and the Gulf.

The path where the moon cast its greatest shadow passed just north of New Orleans and Montgomery, Alabama, directly over Atlanta and then south of Richmond before crossing into the Atlantic Ocean off Assateague Island in the area of Ocean City, Md.

At the time, then-Channel 2’s Bill Nigut was at Georgia Tech, where students set up telescopes, cameras and a variety of viewing devices to document and view the rare sight.

Others on the campus used the event as a reason to party.

Hundreds of people also gathered in Piedmont Park to look to the sky and watch as the afternoon turned almost to night around 12:20 p.m. that day.

That total eclipse only lasted about 9 seconds in Atlanta.

“That was strange. That was really strange. It was spooky,” one woman told Nigut.

Overall, it was an event that the metro will never forget.

Cox Media Group