Late morning clouds threatened to spoil Monday's total solar eclipse, but by the time of the totality, Texas was the place to be.
An estimated 12,000 people flocked to the Cotton Bowl Monday to watch the eclipse as part of an event sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Among them were Robbie Gorman and Tabitha Love, who are both from England but currently live in New York.
"Tabitha started crying for about four minutes," Gorman said.
"It was just so profound," Love said, laughing. "Especially when the sun came back. I was like, 'it's back!' Didn't expect to miss it so much."
The experience was emotional for many of the hundreds of thousands of people who traveled to the region from out of town. Dominic Chemello and his wife Dawn, both 81, travelled made the decision Sunday morning to travel from Prescott, Arizona to Fort Worth.
"I got chills, chills up and down my spine," Dominic Chemello said. "When it hadn't hit the total eclipse yet, the wife and I are going, 'well, you think this was really worth it, 18 hours of driving and three hours of sleep?' And I go, 'yeah.' And then we get the total eclipse. Oh my god. What a payoff."
Millions of Texans live in the path of totality, with North and Central Texas having some of the longest totality times in the country. Dallas was the largest city to be completely within the totality.
The Texas Department of Transportation estimated up to a million travelers would pass to, through and within Texas to be in its path.
That's what brought Connecticut resident Patsy Pedicini from East Haven to Dallas on Monday.
"We wanted to be here because of the eye of totality is going to come right through downtown Dallas," he said, standing in Dealey Plaza.
Pedicini owns a novelty company that sells specialized gear for events like Super Bowls and the World Series. He and his vendors drove 30 hours to Dallas last week to set up shop around downtown and sell eclipse merchandise.
He said he planed more than a year for the eclipse.
"Everybody wants a piece of what's happening, they want a memory," he said. "They want something to bring home to their family to say, 'hey, I was there', or, you know, 'we were there,' and this is going to be something that everybody's going to remember for the rest of their life."
Dallas wasn't the only North Texas city expected to see a boom in business.
The Fort Worth-Arlington-Grapevine area was estimated to rake in nearly $64 million in personal income from business activity associated with the eclipse, the Fort Worth Report previously reported.
And in Ennis, about 40 minutes from the Dallas-Fort Worth area, the city of 22,000 expected to see around 200,000 people come in just for the eclipse.
But on Monday, as clouds started rolling in to parts of Central and North Texas, visitors and locals alike were faced with a factor they couldn't prepare for: the weather. Cloudy conditions were forecast Monday ahead of storms in both the Central and North Texas regions.
But most of North Texas got a brief respite from the clouds around the time of totality.
At the University of North Texas at Frisco, telescopes were set up outside hours before the eclipse. Dozens of onlookers gathered there for a watch party, including 78-year-old Mark Wilson from Oak Cliff, who said staring at the totality was an awe-inspiring experience.
"It made me imagine there was a hole in the fabric of the universe that I could go through, but I didn't know what was on the other side," he said. "It was like a star gate, that's the way it looked to me."
Mark Clampin, astrophysics division director at NASA, was in Texas on Monday hoping to collect scientific data from Waco.
"It's an opportunity to get a very clear picture of the atmosphere around the sun," he said.
NASA scientists were also focusing on changes in temperature and how that impacts the atmosphere, even on an overcast day like Monday. Clampin said NASA would also use data collected from citizen scientists who could help record temperature changes and submit photos.
Back in Dallas at Cotton Bowl Stadium, around 12,300 people registered for a NASA hosted eclipse event and —judging from the bustling crowds — most showed up on Monday, including Salt Lake City resident Angelica Meyer.
This was Meyer's first time in Texas. She said she took a spontaneous trip to Dallas because it was a "once in a lifetime" event she did not want to miss.
After looking up NASA related events, she snagged tickets for the Cotton Bowl, joining thousands of other people to watch the eclipse in a moment she said she would cherish.
"This is an experience that you share that, whether you know these people or not, it's something that you will forever have in common," she said. "Being able to say that you were there and to share that with others in the future, I think is absolutely special."
KERA News reporter Toluwani Osibamowo, Denton Record-Chronicle reporter Brooke Colombo, the Fort Worth Report's Emily Wolf and Marjorie Welch Fitts Louis Fellow Zara Amaechi contributed to this report.
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