Don’t Miss This Eclipse
Right now, a special cosmic arrangement is sliding into place. The moon has positioned itself on the same side of Earth as the sun. The moon has drawn closer to Earth, and its orbit is tilted just so. On April 8, our silvery satellite will pass between our star and our planet, and cast its shadow upon us. In the United States, the darkness will trace a ribbonlike path about 115 miles wide from Texas to Maine, temporarily extinguishing the daylight. Within that area, in cloud-free conditions, the afternoon sun will appear as a radiant white ring suspended in a deep-violet sky: a total solar eclipse. For a few moments, the world will seem upside down, and then the golden sun will burst through again, radiant as ever.
From the perspective of orbital mechanics, solar eclipses are not very special. The sun, the moon, and the Earth align to produce a total solar eclipse somewhere on Earth once every year or two. But for us humans, eclipses are rare. A particular spot on Earth can go centuries without falling in the bounds of totality. The previous American eclipse was only seven years ago, but the next won’t occur until 2044, when the shadow will touch only a sliver of the country. An eclipse as good as the one next month will not occur until 2045. So, if you can, go see it. The spectacle will be worth it.
Throughout human history, many cultures reacted with panic and fear when the sun disappeared without warning; they believed these events to be punishments from displeased gods and omens of a bleak future. Nowadays, we understand the workings of our cosmic neighborhood better than ever before, and we can predict when and where the moon’s shadow will darken the skies across hundreds of years. Instead of breaking the spell, that knowledge has enriched the experience of witnessing a total solar eclipse. We can tap into a uniquely human process that psychologists call “mental time travel,” which allows us to recall past versions of ourselves and imagine the possibilities of our future state. What was I doing in 2017? Where will I be in 2045?
These questions might make you feel a twinge of emotion, sparked by a kind of cosmic introspection that I’ve written about before. It is an exercise in transcendent wonder, or dread, or some other mushy feeling beyond description. The trajectory of our own life is uncertain, but a celestial alignment is a sure thing, as unstoppable as time itself. To be in the path of totality is the ultimate existential experience.
[Read: The existential wonder of space]
Fred Espenak, a retired astrophysicist, has lived his life around eclipses, chasing after totality on every continent rather than waiting for the shadow to come to him. His first total solar eclipse was in 1970, when Espenak was 18 years old, had just gotten his driver’s license, and had persuaded his parents to let him take the family car from New York to South Carolina. He met his wife at the 1995 eclipse, over India. Today he is 72, and has experienced 30 total solar eclipses. “I know there’s a certain point where I’m going to see my last eclipse,” Espenak told me. “Probably within the next 10 to 20 years.” Espenak wishes he could be in New York City in 2079, when totality will cast the skyscrapers in a shimmery deep purple.
You don’t have to be an eclipse chaser to clock the time-warping effects of totality. Jay Ryan, an astronomy enthusiast and a writer, remembers being 8 years old in 1970, when an eclipse traveled up the Eastern Seaboard. Ryan, who lived in Ohio at the time, was disappointed to have missed it and aghast at having to wait until 2017, when he would be 56. “It seemed like an eternity,” Ryan wrote in The Atlantic in 2017. “But a human lifetime passes in a flash.” So have the seven years since the previous eclipse. In 2017, Haven Leeming of Chicago wrote to The Atlantic that she was excited to experience totality in Nebraska with her dad, who had pointed out planets in the night sky to her when she was little. When I checked in with Leeming this month, she told me she’s heading to Texas this time. Her dad will be there, and so will a new member of the family: Leeming’s 4-year-old daughter. She’s too young to understand the movements of giant celestial objects, but she’s old enough to marvel at the soft sparkle of planets overheard with her grandfather.
A total solar eclipse collapses time as we understand it here on Earth, colliding our past and future selves. The illustrator Andy Rash captured this effect in a children’s book, Eclipse, told from the perspective of Rash’s 7-year-old son, who accompanied him to see the 2017 eclipse. On the last page, Rash’s son is a grown man, and sits next to his dad, who is bald with a gray beard. “Years from now, we’ll go again,” the text says. “And once more, we’ll be in the perfect place at the perfect time.” Rash told me he feels keenly the passage of time in his child’s life; his son is a teenager and already Rash’s height, just as the final page of the book shows. In 2045, “my son will be in his mid-30s, and I’ll be quite old,” Rash told me. “I just hope that we are able to get together for that one.”
With the exception of the strands of light that unfurl from the edges of the eclipsed sun, the experience of totality is remarkably consistent. The Atlantic has published several accounts of total solar eclipses over its 167-year history. Each time, the moon’s shadow fell on a different world, but writers were struck by the eclipse’s sudden onset and end. In 1897, the writer Mabel Loomis Todd, recalling totality: “An instantaneous darkness leaped upon the world … With an indescribable out-flashing at the same second, the corona burst forth in wonderful radiance.” Lord Dunsany, in 1939: “The sky darkening to a Prussian blue; and then the huge golden sickle of the returning sun.” Me, in 2017: “There was one last burst of light before it was gone, and in its place emerged a white loop, set against purple shades … Before you can form coherent thought, sunlight bursts through, coating the world in a metallic gold.”
[From the September 1897 issue: In quest of a shadow]
The yawning years between eclipses are a potent reminder that our time on Earth is limited. Espenak makes eclipse almanacs, forecasting the events years into the future, and he knows that bittersweetness well. “I can think about these future eclipses and make detailed predictions of them, but my life is finite,” he said. “These eclipses will go on for millions of years, but we don’t.” This week, I called Donald Liebenberg, a physics and astronomy professor at Clemson University, who has followed totality around the world since 1954. He will be in Texas this time, with his wife. Liebenberg isn’t very sentimental about eclipses; he is more interested in contributing to the study of the corona, the outermost layer of the sun’s atmosphere, which glows in totality and is “much better known now than it was when I started making observations,” he told me. But I had to ask how he felt knowing that he has fewer eclipses ahead of him than he did in his youth. “I just look forward to seeing the next one,” he said.
Liebenberg’s favorite eclipse experience was the one he had aboard the Concorde airplane, which raced through the path of totality at twice the speed of sound when the moon slid in front of the sun in 1973. Liebenberg, dressed in an Air Force flight suit, spent 74 consecutive minutes in the moon’s shadow that day—a tremendous improvement over the handful of minutes that totality lasts over a single spot on Earth.
Totality has always been maddeningly fleeting. “The two minutes and a half in memory seemed but a few seconds—like a breath, a tale that is told,” Todd wrote in 1897. In Rash’s book, the young narrator takes in every second: “I try not to blink.” Cosmic spectacles play out on wildly different scales from human lives, but they have this in common: They both go by faster than you’d think. Whether you’re experiencing the disorienting thrill of totality or the small pleasures of the years in between, you always wish you had more time. For all their sparkle, eclipses are ultimately a memento mori, inspiring us to absorb as much wonder as possible before our time on Earth winks out. This year, people across the continental U.S. will have a chance to bask in a rare sight, one that connects humans across generations and millennia. Make sure you’re one of them.