During the Eclipse, Don’t Just Look Up

There are people who have organized their lives around the appearance of a total eclipse. They’re known as eclipse chasers, or more obscurely, “umbraphiles” (shadow lovers). They’ll travel across continents for perfect weather, collect decades’ worth of eclipse-related life stories, speak lovingly about the sun’s corona. One example is the retired astrophysicist Fred Espenak, who earned a bit of celebrity when the United States Postal Service chose his photo of an eclipse for a 2017 stamp—an efficient way to spread the news that “a total eclipse of the sun is simply the most beautiful, stunning and awe-inspiring astronomical event you can see with the unaided eye,” he once wrote.

Then there are other people (such as me) who need some convincing that it’s as awesome as advertised. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, I talk with Espenak and Marina Koren, The Atlantic’s self-proclaimed “outer-space bureau chief.” Between them, we learn about the full-body experience of an eclipse, which, if not quite spiritual, is at least eerie, when you know what to tune into. How does an eclipse feel on your skin? What does it do to the animals? What does it do to your sense of time? And what are you waiting for?

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Marina Koren: So in 2017, I was in a park in Tennessee, and it was having an eclipse event, and everyone had their eclipse glasses.

Hanna Rosin: This is Atlantic staff writer Marina Koren. On Slack, she goes by “outer space bureau chief.”

Koren: And so you could put them on, and then you could see the moon eating away at the sun, kind of like a little Pac-Man. And then there was no sun. It was just this silver-milky-white ring that kind of looked like an engagement ring hanging in the sky. There was a tiny, little speck on the corner that looked like the diamond.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Koren: And inside the ring and outside of it, it was all the same color, the same deep-evening purple. And I remember looking at the grass beneath me, and the light was just shimmering.

Rosin: What do you mean shimmering?

Koren: I wish I knew. I’ve never seen anything like it before, but I think the very edges of the sun that were visible—and we could see this glowing ring—they were just doing something. The way they were radiating was creating these weird shimmering waves on the grass.

Rosin: Which you hadn’t seen before.

Koren: No. Or since. And I remember when the moon finally slid right in front of the sun, people screamed. And to hear people cheer and laugh and cry out, it was so weird to have that collective reaction. Obviously, we have those types of reactions regularly, but this felt different.

[Crowd shouting]

Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.

In August 2017, Koren—and millions of other people—witnessed the Great American Eclipse. The path of totality touched 14 states, spanning from Oregon to South Carolina, and lasted all but a couple of minutes from the ground.

Koren: Those minutes go real, real fast.

Rosin: I wouldn’t know, because I missed it. Now seven years later, I—and all of you—have another chance to see one. Lots of spots in the U.S. will fall in what’s called the path of totality Monday, April 8.

An eclipse is many things, but one of them is a measure of time. During the last eclipse, my youngest kid was in elementary school. Now he’s thinking about college. And in 2045, which is when we’ll see the next total eclipse of this scope and scale in the U.S., he will be nearing 40, which is impossible to contemplate, so let’s reel it back.

What is an eclipse?

Koren: That’s a great question. It is a cosmic alignment, I guess you could say, of the Earth, the moon, and the sun. And total solar eclipses—and I’ll get to what that means—actually happen quite a bit. About every 18 months or so, there is a spot on Earth where if you stood at the right place and the right time, the moon, from our perspective, would pass in front of the sun and block the sunlight reaching Earth. And so, all of a sudden, daytime would turn into night or kind of like a twilight, dusky color. And the only thing that you would see in the sky, if there’s no clouds, of course, would be a ring of light. That’s the edge of the sun that kind of escapes a little bit from the moon’s shadow and is visible.

Rosin: Right. It’s like an imperfect cover. Already that’s interesting because celestially, it sounds like, Oh, it’s just another Tuesday. It’s not a particularly interesting orbital mechanical event. It’s just amazing to us.

Koren: Yeah, I mean, there is a tiny bit of science to be done. So that little bit of sun that you still can see is called the corona, which is the outermost layer of the sun. And it’s not visible really at any other time from Earth, except during an eclipse. So there’s corona studies, but I think scientists have wrung out as much as they could from that.

Rosin: And is everyone looking at the same things? Is everyone’s head swiveling? What’s happening?

Koren: I think most people were looking up at the sky. People were taking pictures. But I remember I made sure not to take any pictures during those three minutes in 2017. And I don’t plan on taking pictures now.

Rosin: Why?

Koren: Because no camera, unless you have a really, really good camera, it’s not going to capture—your little iPhone camera is not going to capture it properly. I think actually experiencing it without a screen is more powerful because you can feel the temperature change on your skin, too, when the sun goes away. It gets a little bit cooler. And I think it’s an experience for all the senses, and if you’re trying to take pictures of it, you’re kind of missing out on that experience. But I had talked to a lot of eclipse chasers in the lead-up to this event, and they had told me explicitly, Look around you. Take in your surroundings. See what you can hear, feel. So I was actively trying to do that.

Rosin: Because most people are just looking up and, actually, what you should be doing is seeing how your entire environment changes, not just looking at that one thing?

Koren: I think so, because the color is just so strange, and to see a second ago, everything around you was sunlit and bright and familiar, and now it is cast in these strange, shimmery colors. And you do have kind of a primal reaction to it. I think I could almost feel in my body that something was very strange, but intellectually I knew that it was exciting. It’s like both sides of awe—the fearful kind and the wonder-and-astonishment kind.

Rosin: That is close to a spiritual experience, or at least it has all the ingredients of a spiritual experience.

Koren: It sticks, for me, as something beautiful that I will probably only experience twice in life. But it doesn’t translate into, at least it hasn’t for me, into the way I go about the world.

Rosin: An eclipse chaser?

Koren: Mm-hmm.

Rosin: What’s an eclipse chaser?

[Phone ringing]

Koren: They are people who are so obsessed with eclipses that instead of waiting for totality to come to them, they chase after it.

[Phone ringing]

Fred Espenak: Hello. This is Fred.

Rosin: Fred, this is Hanna Rosin from The Atlantic.

Espenak: Hi, Hanna.

Rosin: Hi! Sorry about that.

Koren: So I’ve talked to people that have experienced, I think, 20-something total solar eclipses, and that meant they were in the path of totality for those few moments.

Rosin: Are you getting ready to travel?

Espenak: Yeah, next week we leave for Mexico.

Rosin: Oh, you do. You’re going to Mexico? Where, exactly?

Espenak: To Mazatlán.

Rosin: To Mazatlán.

Koren: They just love it. They plan their lives around it.

Rosin: Wow.

Koren: If you have a friend’s wedding on an eclipse day, these eclipse chasers, they’re not gonna be at that wedding.

Rosin: Is there anything particular about this eclipse that you’re looking forward to or talk to people about?

Espenak: Well, it’s the next one.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Espenak: That’s what’s special about it.

Rosin: After the break: more total eclipses, including a total eclipse of the heart.

Espenak: Seeing a partial eclipse might be a three.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Espenak: And seeing a total eclipse is a million.

Rosin: Really? Wow.

Espenak: Yeah, yeah.

[Break]

Rosin: Could you characterize an eclipse chaser or talk about an individual one? Is there something they have in common? Do they talk about it in terms of logistics? Like, Oh, there was the 2017 one, and the other one, and the other one. Or is there something comes in their voice? What are they looking for? What are they chasing when they’re chasing an eclipse?

Koren: I think the thrill of it, because it is a thrilling experience. And they say that it never gets old.

Espenak: Every time I see one, my heart is beating fast, the adrenaline is pumping, the hair on the back of my neck is standing up in anticipation for it. It is a spectacular event, and anyone who has not seen the total eclipse can’t really appreciate how incredible it is.

Rosin: Wow.

Espenak: To see this thing in the sky, the closest thing I can compare it to is it seems supernatural.

Rosin: This is Fred Espenak. He’s a retired astrophysicist and, of course, an eclipse chaser.

Rosin: And how do you rank among the other eclipse chasers? I mean, do you feel on par, mostly?

Espenak: I guess, I don’t know how to say this without sounding like I’m bragging, but I’m somewhat of a celebrity when I go to these events.

Rosin: Oh, that’s so nice! How does that manifest itself? Like everybody knows your name, or what?

Espenak: Well, because I doubt if there are any more than 10 or 20 people on the planet that have seen as many total eclipses as I have.

Rosin: How many eclipses have you seen?

Espenak: I’ve been to 30 and I’ve seen probably 24.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Espenak: Total eclipses.

Rosin: Total eclipses, yeah. How did you get started on this? Was it personal or a field of study?

Espenak: No, it was personal. I saw a partial eclipse as a kid and realized that a total eclipse was much more spectacular than a partial eclipse. And there was one passing through the eastern United States, and I thought that this was one chance in a lifetime to see a total eclipse.

And it occurred in 1970, and I thought I was pretty well prepared. I had a small telescope with me. I drove down to the eclipse path, had some good weather. I managed to see the eclipse, but what I was not prepared for was the impact that seeing totality had on me.

No descriptions come close to what it’s actually like. It was my first close encounter with what I call awe, true awe, where you feel insignificant and part of something much greater that you don’t completely understand.

Rosin: Was it a pleasant or an unpleasant feeling?

Espenak: Oh, very pleasant.

Rosin: Really? Why would it be pleasant to realize that you were insignificant?

Espenak: Well, insignificant and yet part of it, and somehow it suddenly put things in kind of a greater perspective. Academically, you know you’re on this planet, and it’s spherical, even though there’s no evidence to your everyday experience that you’re on a spinning ball whizzing through space. But all of a sudden that just seemed intuitively correct.

Koren: For me, my theory is that these people are not—and like the rest of us, we will live our lives out on this one planet, so we have to understand the universe and commune with the universe from this one single point on Earth.

So if you can hop on a plane and go and cover the Earth and commune with space in this way, then why not? And then you can say, I’ve been a part of some type of celestial alignment multiple times because this is the only place I could do it from, so why not try to experience it as much as possible?

Espenak: It’s something I tell everybody should be on their bucket list. Everybody needs to see one at least once in their life.

Rosin: Yeah.

Espenak: Here is a golden opportunity where you don’t really have to travel very far, and there are over 30 million Americans that live right in the path.

Rosin: Yeah. Does that make you feel good, that lots of people are going to get to share that experience?

Espenak: Yeah. I think we get too jaded with the artificial world that we live in, and this is reality. This is the real universe that we live in, and it’s a chance to connect with that. And there’s nothing in our power to stop this eclipse.

Rosin: Yeah.

Espenak: It’s going to happen, and sometimes it’s a good reminder that there are things beyond our control.

Rosin: You’ve written about the eclipse as a collapse of time. What do you mean by that? Or a colliding of your past and future self?

Koren: Yeah. I remember thinking in 2017 that 2024 felt so far away and that it would never come. And now here we are.

Rosin: Yeah. (Laughs.)

Koren: And I spoke to an illustrator named Andy Rash, who wrote a children’s book called Eclipse based on his experience of seeing the 2017 eclipse with his son, who was 7. His son is 14 now.

And so Andy and I were talking about the way that eclipses mark time in our lives, and I asked him, Have you talked to your son about the fact that after this, you have to wait until 2045? And Andy said no because his kid’s 14. He’s living in the moment, and he’s watching eclipses with his dad. He doesn’t need to think that far into the future. And probably that span of time is just too abstract for him.

Rosin: What about for the dad? He’s got to be thinking, How old am I going to be in 2045?

Koren: Oh yeah, he’s really sentimental and sappy about it, for sure, because his hope is that he and his son will be together in 2045 to see this, but his hope is also tied up with his hopes for his child: What kind of adult will he grow into? What kind of man will he be? That will become apparent in 2045, and the eclipse will be there to meet that person.

Rosin: How old are you now?

Espenak: 72.

Rosin: And how old were you then?

Espenak: When I saw that first total eclipse, I was 18.

Rosin: How many more eclipses do you think you’ll see?

Espenak: Boy, it depends on how well my health goes out here. I’m going to keep going to them for as long as I can. But realistically, will I live ’til 80? 90? Hard to say, but it becomes more and more clear to me each time I see a total eclipse that it’s getting to the point where I’m going to see my last one.

And it’s just like death: You don’t know when the last one is. But it causes one to pause and wonder, Well, you know, here’s another chance to see it. It might be the last time.

Rosin: Yeah, well, I hope not, for your sake.

Fred, thank you so much for joining us for this interview. We really appreciate it, and I hope this trip goes exactly the way you want it to.

Espenak: Thank you so much. Clear sky to everybody.

Rosin: Thanks. Bye-bye.

Espenak: Bye.

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid and Andrea Valdez, fact-checked by Will Gordon, and engineered by Erica Huang. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening, and clear skies to all of you.