The total solar eclipse is finally here. Will the clouds be here, too?

DALLAS — Here comes the moon, finally.

Twenty-three minutes after noon local time on Monday, the moon will begin its gradual eclipsing of the sun. An hour and 17 minutes later, totality will arrive here in Dallas, and for nearly four minutes this city will go dark, animals will get confused and — if, if, if the clouds don’t spoil everything — people will behold the spectacle of a total solar eclipse.

If anyone misses the event, they can catch the next one in Dallas in the year 2317.

“We mayors have the ability to call in weather when we need to,” said Dallas Mayor Eric L. Johnson, who has been told that 400,000 eclipse aficionados could be streaming into his city, and, like everyone else, has been anxiously looking at the cloud forecasts. “I’ve put in the request for clear skies.”

The Great North American Eclipse of 2024 is a continent-scale event. The moon’s shadow will race toward the northeast from the sandy Pacific beaches of Mexico to the windswept Atlantic capes and coves of Newfoundland. The entire Lower 48 will experience at least a partial eclipse.

Within that broad phenomenon is a special zone called the path of totality, a band roughly 115 miles wide where the moon will completely eclipse the sun. During the last major eclipse to cross the country, in 2017, about 12 million people lived in the path of totality, by NASA’s estimate. This eclipse blows that away, with about 32 million residing in totality.

Along the path are major cities including San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Buffalo and Rochester, N.Y. Louisville, Cincinnati and Columbus, Ohio, are darn close to the path. Montreal sits on the edge.

But the eclipse is also a chance for smaller communities, one-stoplight towns and boondocks hamlets to get some glory for being providentially located squarely on the centerline. At the very edges of the path of totality, the sun’s obscuration may last just a few seconds, but on the centerline there can be about four minutes of darkness.

“We get 4 minutes and 13 seconds. We’re one of the largest cities that gets that much,” said Carla Pendergraft, assistant director of tourism for Waco, Tex. That’s significantly more than Austin, she points out. “Every second counts when you’re an eclipse chaser. Every second.”

‘This amazing phenomenon’

No state has as much riding on this eclipse as Texas, which historically has a good chance for clear skies this time of year and has anticipated up to a million visitors from out of state. Savvy travelers made reservations long ago. Every self-respecting restaurant with a patio in Dallas seems to have an eclipse party planned.

Johnson and his staff have plans for traffic control, knowing that the 2017 eclipse caused epic traffic jams. People tend to bolt from their viewing location when totality is over, and that can interfere with emergency measures.

The Perot Museum of Nature and Science has teamed up with the Carnegie Institution for Science to distribute a million eclipse glasses in the Dallas area, and 29 astronomers with Carnegie have been roaming the city explaining eclipses.

Schoolchildren ask great questions, not just about eclipses but also black holes and dark matter and all things space, said Carnegie astronomers Josh Simon and Kyle Kremer, who were staffing a table at the Perot on Saturday, using Styrofoam balls to represent the moon and Earth and the way one can cast a shadow on the other.

Kids want to know: Will a dog go blind if it looks at the sun during the eclipse?

“Dogs are usually smarter than humans,” Kremer explained.

There’s an agenda here, beyond just stoking awe and wonder: The United States needs young people to go into STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — fields.

“A lot of kids seeing it will start to wonder about this amazing phenomenon, and start thinking about the moon, start thinking about the sun and start thinking about the Earth,” said Eric Isaacs, president of Carnegie. “It’s a gateway to science. This is a gateway into the world of nature.”

Some of the small cities in Texas among the first to be touched by the moon’s shadow are nationally known for reasons of controversy or tragedy. Science enthusiasts who have been planning celebrations hope that the eclipse can help recast these communities.

Eagle Pass, Tex., on the border between the United States and Mexico, which has been a hot spot in the ongoing dispute over border policy, is holding a multiday music festival in anticipation of totality, which will begin at 1:27 p.m. local time on Monday. A bit farther north and east, where totality will start two minutes later, is Uvalde, known to most Americans because of the deadly school shooting in 2022.

“Uvalde and Eagle Pass: Those two communities need to be known for something great,” said Jennifer Miller-Ray, an associate professor of education at Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Tex., who has been working on science outreach projects in advance of the eclipse.

“I’m thinking this is a peace mission,” she added. “This eclipse is going to bring total peace to this area, so we’re working with our junior college, our school district, our cities, our counties, the landowners to try to bring people together — all different races, classes, different groups together — in the name of science.”

Clouds, and silver linings

Debbie Mahoney, 67, a nurse practitioner in Longview, Tex., saw the 2017 eclipse on a group bike expedition in Missouri. As she strolled the Dallas Arboretum on Saturday, she said that “2017 was a total life-changing spiritual experience for me, and I’ve been counting down to this day for seven years.”

What, exactly, was so moving about it?

“I think it reminds us of our place in the universe,” she said.

Eclipses are beguiling phenomena to people who like to plan. Astronomers can predict them thousands of years in advance. What scientific agencies can’t do is control the weather. They cannot banish clouds. A lot of scientists in recent days have said they simply have their fingers crossed, despite a lack of peer-reviewed evidence that this will change anything.

The weather for much of the country is, unfortunately, not eclipse friendly. The national forecast skews cloudy. Much of Texas appears to be in the throes of a cloud-making low-pressure system. The forecast maps show clouds extending across vast stretches of the eastern half of the country, and not getting completely out of the way until the moon’s shadow reaches the cold area of New England.

Dallas could go either way. It’s all about timing. Sunday in Dallas arrived in brilliant fashion, with Chamber of Commerce weather, but the forecast for totality on Monday afternoon is “mostly cloudy” and a lot is riding on what the meaning of “mostly” is. Meanwhile, down in Austin, the forecast calls for “scattered thunderstorms.” Someone please define “scattered.”

Texas weather is fickle, locals point out.

“You wait 15 minutes, it could be raining,” said Doug Cochran, park superintendent at Enchanted Rock State Natural Area, a 425-foot pink granite dome west of Austin that’s in the path of totality.

His park has limited capacity, and on March 11 at 8 a.m. began taking reservations for 250 day-use entrance tickets for the eclipse. It sold out by 8:52 a.m.

That’s the story across the state: sold out, booked up. There is no sign that the sketchy forecast is keeping people away, and event planners insist the show will go on regardless of the whims of the atmosphere.

Nicola “Nicky” Fox, the head of science for NASA, tells a harrowing story about observing the 2017 solar eclipse in Nebraska. She is a heliophysicist and stellar explainer of all things science, so she was booked to be on television talking about the eclipse. She also arranged for friends and family to join her there. Her parents flew in from England.

Then came clouds.

“It never occurred to me that it might be cloudy,” said Fox, who now runs a nearly $8 billion science portfolio at NASA.

Her father looked at her.

“It’s going to clear up, right?” he said.

“That was the moment I thought, ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’” she recalled.

And then it rained.

But then, as she was on television, crushed, a member of the TV crew told her to stop and look behind her. The skies had cleared. An eclipse miracle!

“I basically lost my cookies on national TV,” she said.

Carolyn Y. Johnson contributed to this report.