Jarred Foster cheered with his friends as a voice announced over the speaker that only seven minutes remained until the total solar eclipse.

Seated on the bleachers in L.T. Smith Stadium, the Hart County High School sophomore said he hadn’t been paying a lot of attention to the first part of the program, which was hosted by WKU for K-12 students who attended schools outside of the path of totality.

But now his face was turned up, and his eyes were fixed firmly on the sun as he stared up at the sky through a solar viewer provided by WKU.

“It’s cool ’cause the moon covers the sun,” Foster said.

Foster said he hasn’t studied the eclipse much in school, and he has never seen an eclipse in real life. His science teacher, though, showed a brief TV clip of a solar eclipse, so he has an idea of what it might look like.

“It’ll be black with a ring around it,” Foster said.

Reporter Emma Collins can be reached at 270-745-6011 or [email protected].