Arkansas will experience its third total solar eclipse in recorded history in April 2024, and UCA is already preparing the community for an optimal viewing experience.
UCA will invite the community to Estes Stadium on April 8, 2024, to participate in a campus watch party.
Nearby on Bruce Street, there will be the Eclipse 2024 Street Fair, where attendees can enjoy food from a selection of local food trucks and listen to live music.
The beginning of the totality phase of the eclipse is expected to begin at 1:51 p.m. and last three minutes and 56 seconds: almost four complete minutes of darkness.
In August 2017, UCA hosted over 1,400 students, employees and community members on the McAlister Hall lawn on Aug. 21 to view a 90% totality eclipse; however, next year’s event is expected to dwarf the previous.
For William Slaton, professor and director of engineering physics, planning for the 2024 total eclipse began in 2017.
Slaton said that he has been working with the Arkansas Space Grant Consortium to be sure that there would be funding opportunities for faculty and student projects leading up to the 2024 eclipse and added that President Davis’ creation of an eclipse committee helped further begin planning for the eclipse on campus.
“Several grants were written to help support the eclipse effort: I wrote one to the Conway Advertising and Promotion Commission for event advancement support, Gayle Seymore wrote an Eclipse Event proposal to the Arkansas Space Grant Commission and Scott Austin applied for Arkansas Space Grant Funding for upgrades to the UCA Observatory to help facilitate automatic tracking of the eclipse,” Slaton said.
“The enormity of planning for a major event and the potential number of visitors to campus and Conway necessitated that the eclipse committee be reorganized and led by President Davis’ chief-of-staff, Amy Whitehead. Since then, the practical matters of deciding where and how to plan for the eclipse on campus have progressed as well as the deployment of UCA’s eclipse website,” Slaton said.
Lacey Kanipe, the public information officer for the Conway Police Department said that the department, the UCAPD and city offices have also conducted meetings to prepare for the eclipse.
“The Conway Police Department will be creating a comprehensive plan regarding the potential traffic issues that may arise from the influx of individuals visiting our city. Many of the hotels in our city are already booked full for the event, so we expect a surplus of travelers to come to Conway,” Kanipe said.
Kanipe said that planning will continue to progress over the coming months and that a statewide meeting is set for Tuesday, June 27, 2023.
Slaton said that planning for the eclipse will continue through the summer.
The university posts event updates to https://uca.edu/eclipse/.