“There was a very impressive prominence visible during this eclipse,” says Lisa Upton, a solar scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. “Stunning to behold!! This was such a magnificent eclipse for anyone who was fortunate enough to see totality.”

A total solar eclipse is the only time when earthlings can see the sun’s atmosphere, or corona. During an eclipse, the moon blocks all the light from the sun’s visible surface, which usually masks the corona. But during totality, for just a couple of minutes, the corona appears as a fiery white halo around the black moon. And scientists knew that the corona could be particularly interesting during this eclipse, which coincided neatly with the maximum of the sun’s 11-year activity cycle.

Those expectations were met when the sun provided a stunning prominence that was visible near the bottom of our host star to many during totality. (The sun’s orientation varies depending on a viewer’s location on Earth. The sun appeared to be rotated about 90 degrees between Mexico, where the eclipse’s shadow made landfall, and Canada, where it returned to the ocean.)

Seattle-based user experience consultant Torrey Podmajersky received a cold e-mail in January from a recruiter called Jennie Johnson. The message said Johnson had created a career profile for Podmajersky and suggested a few matching openings, but the profile was too broad and left out several important pieces of her professional history. Podmajersky, who hadn’t been job hunting in the first place, figured it was a scam.

It wasn’t until she scrolled to the bottom that she discovered Johnson wasn’t even a human. The e-mail had come from an artificial intelligence bot; the company behind it described it as an “AI representation of an elite career coach.” “[I felt] a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach,” Podmajersky recalls, “because I recognized that it’s designed to make someone feel seen, special, cared for, advocated for—and all of that is a lie.”