Just You and the Universe

Like migratory birds guided by the stars, hundreds of thousands of Americans have flocked in the direction of today’s total solar eclipse. They have settled within a narrow strip of Earth where the moon will blot out the sun almost completely. For a few precious minutes, if the clouds don’t interfere, eclipse watchers will experience the surreality of being held by the shadow of the moon. The sky will suddenly be cast in twilight, the sun appearing as a radiant, pearl-white ring. Then the light will wobble, shifting to a shimmery gold, and the sun will burst through, reclaiming its place in the sky.

Humans are privy to all kinds of space wonders these days, thanks to Mars rovers, Jupiter orbiters, and giant space-dwelling telescopes. We can pull up Hubble’s famous deep field at any moment and see, on a single screen, several thousands of galaxies. But these captured marvels have been reassembled for the sake of our senses. Electromagnetic radiation is converted into visible light, strings of zeros and ones into meaningful information. The sights and sounds are filtered through the government agencies, space companies, and academic institutions that package them for public release.

But to be in the path of totality during an eclipse is to experience the cosmos in a truly rare way. We can remove our eclipse glasses and stare at our star. We can experience unadulterated communion with the universe.

[Read: Don’t miss this eclipse]

The past several years have given us an absolute plethora of cosmic awe. Each time NASA releases a new picture from the James Webb Space Telescope, which is more powerful than Hubble, we meet a luminous, freshly ignited star; shimmery interstellar clouds; sparkling, ancient galaxies as they were billions of years ago, close to the Big Bang. These images are astonishing. They are real. They also require some human tinkering.

The Webb telescope observes the universe in infrared, so scientists must fill its images in with color that’s detectable by the human eye. Because we perceive the longest wavelengths of visible light as red, longer wavelengths of infrared light are also made red. The shortest wavelengths of visible light look violet to us, so the shortest infrared wavelengths are rendered violet. The wavelengths in between take on other colors of the rainbow, a process that involves some artistic license. “You really are trying to show the different details and the processes that are happening in astronomical images, but at the end of the day, you want it to be very compelling,” Alyssa Pagan, a science-visuals developer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, said in 2022 during the unveiling of Webb’s first images.

Visual artists must strike a balance between accuracy and artistry when conveying scientific observations that exist in data that only experts can parse. In 2017, scientists announced the discovery of seven Earth-size planets around a star 40 light-years away, including artist-created “plausible models” of those alien worlds. The artists had little data to go on, so they drew inspiration from worlds in our own solar system. The innermost planet, hot and tumultuous, was modeled after Io, a moon of Jupiter that churns with lava. The planets with lower densities, suggesting the presence of water around rock, were made to resemble Earth. A planet they thought was the likeliest to have an atmosphere was given a Neptune-like facade, with a few white clouds hovering over a smooth, blue-green exterior. Until technology becomes advanced enough to truly photograph these and thousands of other known exoplanets, scientists and artists must make approximations and use their imagination.

[Read: The most dazzling eclipse in the universe]

A total solar eclipse, by contrast, requires no embellishment or interpretation. You don’t need an expert to decipher the “the un-sunlike sun,” as the astronomer Maria Mitchell described it during her own eclipse experience in 1878. You don’t need a solar physicist by your side to experience the wonder of the corona, the outermost layer of the sun’s atmosphere, which peeks out from behind the moon as it sends light shimmering in waves across the skin of your arms and the grass at your feet. And even without a sense of sight, eclipses are visceral: Some birds cease chirping; watchful humans will hoot and holler. And when the sun temporarily stops warming the Earth, the air suddenly grows chillier.

In their easy perceptibility, eclipses can make us keenly aware of the universe’s machinations. Rarely do we consider sunrises and sunsets for what they actually represent: the movement of a giant rocky planet rotating on its axis, toward and away from its parent star. When I admire a full moon or a gleaming crescent, I don’t think at all about the orbital mechanics that produce our satellite’s shifting appearance. Such spectacles are clear-cut signs of a universe in motion, but a total solar eclipse provides unignorable proof.

The scenes of an eclipse unfold within minutes, transitioning smoothly from one set to another, as if guided by an invisible stagehand. They make one very aware of the fact that, as Andy Rash, an illustrator of a children’s book about eclipses, put it to me recently, “you’re watching giant objects move around and hide one behind the other.” The realization can prompt us to consider the moon and the sun and the Earth as the three-dimensional objects they really are, shaped into spheres by the same gravitational forces that keep them looping around one another forever. Outer space, during an eclipse, seems more alive. That effect is unusual even for other kinds of cosmic alignments, such as planetary conjunctions. About every 20 years, the orbits of Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn align, and Jupiter and Saturn appear close together in the night sky, like a pair of sparkling earrings; you can even see them with your naked eye. But because the planets take several weeks to move toward one another, the distance between them shrinking marginally every evening, we can’t meaningfully observe the movement in real time.

[Read: Solar eclipses are always with us]

Not everyone who wants to experience totality firsthand can. To be an eclipse chaser requires financial resources to cover travel and planning, and time and flexibility to do it. Countless Americans cannot afford to race against celestial orbits and must instead wait for the shadow of the moon to come to them. When it does, even after decades of suspense, the raw, unmediated experience is a jolt to the system.

This year, I’ve been lucky enough to fly toward the eclipse to Niagara Falls, where I’m hoping clouds won’t obscure the event. Even though I know it’s coming, I also know that the sudden shift into darkness will feel unnatural, as it did during my first eclipse experience, in 2017—that I will feel as if I have suddenly been transported to an alien planet. After, when the sun returns to its usual intensity, it will seem as if nothing has happened. But I’ll hold on to the memory of the most undiluted view of the universe available from this perch.