Staff photo / Ed Runyan Mindy Wiesensee of Struthers takes a selfie with her nephew, Kevin Halas of Lordstown, as they don their eclipse glasses and sport the eclipse T-shirts Wiesensee made. They enjoyed the total solar eclipse at the Halliday’s Winery and adjacent Lake Milton Dam on Monday afternoon. The T-shirts were made using bleach and objects such as plates to create lunar shapes.

LAKE MILTON — Total Eclipse 2024 lived up to the hype at Lake Milton — the eclipse itself, the way the sky got dark and then light over the lake just the way a beautiful sunset and sunrise does. Even the weather was warm, and the persistent clouds did not get in the way.

“Oh yea. This is my third one. Love it. Love all of it. I probably sat with my glasses on 15 minutes,” said David Kanna of Youngstown as he stood in the afterglow of the total eclipse and the moon made its less dramatic fade back off of the sun.

The 2,800-foot long, approximately 20-foot wide Lake Milton Dam in the side yard of the Halliday’s Winery provided a perfect place to watch and learn what a total solar eclipse is all about.

The eclipse lasted a relatively short minute and lined up just perfectly over the sun, providing a glimpse of the corona, which appears as streams of white light.

But perhaps even more amazing for a first-time eclipse watcher is the way mid-day turned to dusk, and water had an evening-time shine and the air temperature dropped and then an orange sunset rimmed the horizon as it changed to near darkness that lasted a short while.

As that brief minute ended, a woman sitting on her lawn chair on the dam with friends said, “Here comes the sun now” and the Beatles classic “Here comes the Sun” streamed across the winery lawn and out to the dam.

The woman put her eclipse glasses back on and told her friends, “I literally cried.”

The total eclipse deserved its top billing, but the eclipse lasted 2.5 hours in all. The first half was when the moon slowly moved over the sun starting at about 2 p.m. until the 3:15 eclipse. That gave people plenty of time to adjust to using eclipse glasses and try different ways of photographing the eclipse, taking care not to damage cameras, phone cameras and telescopes with filters.

Sitting in the yard or on the dam was a laid back party atmosphere with food and beverages available from the winery. For $30, participants received eclipse glasses, a shirt and cup. Lake Milton was the hot spot for watching the eclipse in Mahoning County, as most other parts of the county were not in the 124-mile-wide path of the total eclipse.

In the final minutes before totality arrived, Barbara Rapp of Chevy Chase, Maryland, provided good observations about the temperature and what was happening in the sky.

“Oh, it’s definitely getting darker,” she said at 3:10 p.m. — four minutes before the total eclipse. “It’s just a sliver,” she said at 3:11 p.m. of the amount of the sun still not yet covered.

As the total eclipse ended, her daughter, Julia Cardwell of North Carolina commented, “I didn’t expect the horizon to be that color. It was like pink,” she said. She saw the total eclipse of August 2017, she said.

As the total eclipse waned, Rapp told her daughter it was a good decision to make the trip.

During that longer build-up as the partial eclipse played out, people enjoyed the view, food, music and walked the dam to check out the spillway on the western end.

Scott McCluskey of Boardman was walking back to the winery after checking out the spillway with 4-year-old Charlie, and Charlie’s mother, Chloe Stringham of Austintown.

When McCluskey was asked whether he thought Charlie would be able to remember seeing a total eclipse when he grows older, McCluskey, who said he is Charlie’s “Papa,” said he thinks Charlie will. “He’s got a great memory,” McCluskey said.

“It’s not something he is going to see again in his lifetime unless he travels,” McCluskey said, noting that Charlie will be almost 80 when the next total eclipse comes around this part of the country in 2099.

Nick Veltri of Middletown, New York, said he traveled the six hours to Lake Milton to see the eclipse with his family because he’s a Youngstown guy who graduated from Chaney High School and Youngstown State University.

But the opportunity to see a total solar eclipse was the biggest draw. “Better than the view we would have gotten in New York, and it’s always nice to visit family,” he said.

Also during the partial eclipse before the total eclipse, JoAnn Weber of Canfield proclaimed the view though her eclipse glasses “pretty sweet.”

She had looked through a pair in 2017 during an earlier eclipse so she knew what to expect, which helps, she said. She also credited the news media and other sources for doing “a real good job of educating everybody about how to view the eclipse safely.”