Former students keep eclipse promise 4,163 days later

Former students and colleagues of a teacher who died in 2019 gathered outside Kvennaskólinn in Reykjavík, a school, on August 12 to watch a total solar eclipse in her memory, mbl.is reported.

On March 20, 2015, a partial solar eclipse was visible over Reykjavík. Guðrún Margrét Jónsdóttir, a physics teacher and form teacher at the school, watched it with her students outside the school.

The experience made such an impression that the group looked up when the next solar eclipse would be visible in Iceland. They decided to meet again in the same place on the school grounds to watch it together.

The students calculated that 4,163 days separated the two eclipses. Guðrún wrote the number of days remaining on her classroom board and continued the countdown after the class graduated in 2015. The students later created a Facebook event where they continued counting down to August 12, 2026.

Guðrún last posted in the Facebook event on Christmas Eve in 2018. She died of cancer on January 17, 2019, but her former students continued the countdown.

Esther Elín Þórðardóttir was in Guðrún’s form class. She described her former teacher as an excellent teacher and a good friend.

“She explained difficult material well, and most of us managed to work our way through the exercises and courses with her help,” Esther wrote on Facebook. “But above all, she was our friend. She was cool and tough. She was our equal, a true friend.”

“It seemed like an entire eternity until the next gathering. August 12, 2026 sounded like a distant dream, but we intended to meet our dear friend again at that milestone. She was the most excited of all of us about the gathering,” Esther wrote.

More than 11 years after the first eclipse, former students and colleagues gathered outside the school and watched the total eclipse in Guðrún’s memory.