A year from today, a shadow will fall from Oregon to South Carolina. The darkness will travel across the countryside at a speed of over 2000 miles per hour, making landfall on the Pacific at 9:04am and heading out to sea across the Atlantic just 73 minutes later. Those inside the path of totality — where the blinding brightness of the Sun’s disk is entirely covered — will feel the temperature drop, hear birds go silent, see the sky go dark, the brighter stars and planets appear, and the sun turn black and become ringed by a halo of pearly white radiance. The fact that science can predict this down to the second and mile is one of its greatest accomplishments.
It will be the first total solar eclipse in the continental United States since 1979. Things have certainly changed since then — coverage of the eclipse will be almost entirely online instead of in printed papers and the evening news. Though totality will only touch the United States in 2017, people all over the world will be able to see the millions of eclipse tweets, Instagrams, and Facebook posts as the eclipse happens in real time. This will be the first solar eclipse to touch a population of this size, 12 million alone living within the path of totality, since the advent of social media.
Solar eclipses are rare. And usually, only a tiny fraction of the Earth’s population gets to see the spectacular event. It wasn’t until 1715 when Edmond Halley used his friend, Isaac Newton’s, laws of planetary motion to predict the exact time and location of a total solar eclipse — in this case, over London. Throughout the 18th and 19th century, it was a point of European intellectual pride to mount an expedition to observe these rare astronomical events. Many of these observers were taking advantage of the burgeoning professional tourist industry: steamships, railways, hotels, and guidebooks all brought the moneyed tourists of Western Europe to the colonies of their globe-spanning empires. Scientific observers would climb the Andes in South America, row ashore on beaches in the South Pacific, set up their equipment in the jungles of Southeast Asia and, thanks to the predictive power of Newtonian celestial mechanics, anticipate the moon crossing in front of the Sun at the appointed time on the appointed day. Whether or not they were able to see it then relied on whether they knew their position and the vagaries of weather.
Determining position was one of the goals of these solar eclipse expeditions. The records of Victorian-era eclipse expeditions are filled with tables of times and positions on the sky; measure the local time at which a solar eclipse is seen in some far off country, and the difference between that and the time predicted for Greenwich, England, tells you how far around the world you are. For every hour of difference between local and Greenwich time, you are 15 degrees away in longitude. If you want to know how big your empire is, a total solar eclipse is just the tool.
In addition to those tables of numbers, Victorian journals were also filled with unflattering portrayals of those people with which the expeditions were surrounded. “It is not at all probable that one of the dusky lookers-on at our preparations had a remote idea of the approaching phenomenon, and certainly not of the objects of our arrangements… No effort could have given them the slightest comprehension of the causes of the unusual darkness, nor why the white man should come so far to look at it.” So said one eclipse observer in Africa in 1896 and recounted in A. Soojung-Kim Pang’s 2002 book, Empire and the Sun: Victorian Solar Eclipse Expeditions. Other reports spoke of the need to keep the “natives” at bay by force of arms lest the delicate observations be ruined. In case we scientists believe we have moved beyond this type of thinking, a disagreement over whether astronomers should build a new observatory on top of Hawaii’s sacred mountain, Mauna Kea, led one astronomer to email colleagues complaining of attacks on the construction site “by a horde of native Hawaiians.”
Like tornado chasers, eclipse chasers today travel all over the world to see ever more exotic locations in the shadow of the Moon. Even now, towns in rural, far flung communities that fall under the path of the eclipse are preparing themselves for the onslaught of tourists they expect to see. In Eastern Oregon, a land of rocky, volcanic buttes and canyons dotted with green pastures and blue rivers, locals are equal parts excited and terrified at what the eclipse might bring. In a place where the towns boast a population of no more than a couple thousand people, they are being told to expect between ten and fifty thousand people on eclipse day.
In the next 12 months, millions of tourists will pore over maps of the United States looking for the perfect location, with the perfect predicted weather, and the chance of quickly driving to a cloudless location if, on the appointed day, their first choice of location is cloudy. Educational and adventure-travel businesses have grown to meet the demand for eclipse-chasing trips. In 2013 I was an invited expert on one such trip that set off on a four-masted sailing ship that spent three weeks sailing from Spain to Barbados — just so that in the mid-Atlantic we could intersect the Moon’s shadow for 40 seconds of totality. Every single person on board had paid several thousand dollars to be there. Not a single one felt their time and money had not been worth those few moments of astronomical awe.
On August 21 next year, this All-American eclipse will become the most photographed and internet-posted event in human history. In the time it takes the shadow to travel across the US and reach the East Coast, everyone there will have seen the rest of the country progressively go nuts with excitement on social media. It will be like New Year’s Eve at the turn of the millennium but traveling in reverse. In such a world, where we now live, work, talk, text, and share online there may be those who are tempted to think that they need not travel into totality’s path to experience this event. Don’t be fooled; it is a multi-sensory overload like no other, one for which no photo or article can possibly prepare you. Not even this one. Technology may have changed, but the awesome actuality of seeing worlds align hasn’t. Beat a path to totality. You will not be disappointed.
Dr. Tyler Nordgren, University of Redlands, is the author of Sun Moon Earth: The history of solar eclipses from omens of doom to Einstein and exoplanets.
