Nine students and two teachers made the trip to Greensboro, Vt., to experience two minutes, 46 seconds of totality during Monday’s solar eclipse.

Director of the Dublin School Perkin Observatory Matthew Saveliev and technology teacher Tom Tullio were the chaperones for the overnight trip.

The crew traveled on Sunday to beat the expected traffic, and met and camped on-site with a student group from Vermont Academy. There was plenty of time to prepare and socialize before Monday’s main event.

Saveliev set up a telescope on Sunday night for guided stargazing. The new moon was, of course, not visible, but Jupiter, Uranus, the Pleiades cluster and Orion Nebula were all located.

Equipped with eclipse glasses, a solar scope and a pair of solar binoculars, the partial phase, which lasted an hour and 12 minutes leading up to totality, was itself a first for many of the students. Dublin Astronomy Club President J. J. Johnson-Speaks made it a personal priority to plan and execute this event, realizing years ago that it was a rare opportunity to experience two total eclipses in the United States in less than a decade.

The group watched not only through their certified glasses, but also through solar telescopes and binoculars, seeing sunspots and solar flares up close as the moon slowly made its way across the sun.

Students from both schools were completely entranced by the spectacle, with hoots and hollers spontaneously rising from the crowd as totality arrived and eclipse glasses were removed. Meanwhile, the sound of distant fireworks could be heard echoing across the Vermont countryside.

Dublin School senior Juniper Fiffer summed up the experience as “everything I thought it would be and then some!” while sophomore Giovanni Forero called it “awesome sauce!” Sophomore Sarah Mundorff noted that “the difference between almost totality and totality is so much bigger than you imagine!”