Teachers like Heidi Aufenthie, and preschoolers at Holy Redeemer School headed outside with special viewing glasses to try and see Monday’s solar eclipse. It turned out to be a little too cloudy, however.

MARSHALL — Thick gray clouds made it tough to see the full extent of the solar eclipse in southwest Minnesota. But Marshall area residents still headed outside Monday afternoon for a chance to catch a glimpse.

“We were thinking we weren’t going to be able to see it,” said Sara Welch, earth science teacher at Marshall Middle School.

Students and teachers at MMS gathered in the school courtyard, watching through special glasses as the moon started to pass in front of the sun. Gaps in the clouds early Monday afternoon made it possible to see a partial eclipse, with the sun looking more and more crescent-shaped as the minutes went by.

“It’s really cool. It looks kind of like a thick moon,” one student said.

It took students a little while to get the hang of using the dark viewing glasses, but they said it was a fun experience to see the eclipse appear.

“You can see the clouds pass through it,” one student said.

Having a short break in Monday’s overcast weather was a stroke of luck for local eclipse viewers.

“It’s extremely exciting,” Welch said. “Students are getting to see something they maybe haven’t experienced in their life before.”

MMS teachers said one of their fellow faculty members, Barbara Wendt, had given a presentation about the eclipse in advance of Monday.

“And then the school district was awesome enough to provide glasses for everyone,” Welch said. The eclipse experience would be fun for students and teachers to discuss as they learned about the solar system in class, Welch said.

The gap in the clouds was gone quickly. The preschool class at Holy Redeemer School went outside and put on viewing glasses around 2 p.m., when the eclipse was supposed to be at its greatest extent in Minnesota. But as the kids looked up, the sky was overcast again.

Thanks to resources like livestreams, there was still a chance to see more of the eclipse, even if it wasn’t showing in Marshall.

“Let’s go inside and see what we can see on the Smart Board,” HRS teachers told the preschoolers.

In order to see the total eclipse in person, Marshall residents would have to travel to one of the many cities in its path. Bill Moudry and members of his family did just that while on vacation this week. They made a stop in Indianapolis, where they saw the solar eclipse.

“Indianapolis turned out to have 95% clear skies. We were very lucky,” Moudry said.

Moudry said he had witnessed the 2017 solar eclipse in Wyoming, and he had been planning a trip to see the 2024 eclipse ever since. On Monday, he and his family were headed to a relation’s home in Indianapolis, but they didn’t make it there in time for the totality.

“The traffic was horrendous,” Moudry said. People interested in seeing the eclipse added to the regular highway traffic. “We just pulled over and watched at a little gas station.”

There were about 25 other people at the gas station, Moudry said. “We had stopped at the library to get some glasses, and we went over and shared our eclipse glasses with them.”

When the eclipse reached totality, the change was dramatic. As the sky went dark, Moudry said, “The streetlights came on. It got about 10 to 15 degrees cooler.”

It was also a peaceful and special moment to experience together with other people, he said.

“Maybe it’ll pique some interest in the younger generation, to get outside,” Moudry said.