WRITTEN BY HANK GARFIELD
Barring unforeseen circumstances, this will be my sixth total eclipse of the sun.
My first was in Deer Isle, Maine in the summer of my sixth year: July 20, 1963. It’s the eclipse Stephen King depicts in “Dolores Claiborne.” There were several families with lots of kids around. My mother made us all paper-bag helmets with eye slots covered by exposed X-ray film she’d procured from Blue Hill hospital. We looked like little spacemen. Inside, the grownups had made pinhole cameras with the living room shades. But everyone came outside when it got dark.
In 1972, my parents split up, and my grandparents took my mother, my four sisters and me to Prince Edward Island on a vacation aligned with the July 10 eclipse. This is allegedly the eclipse in Carly Simon’s song “You’re So Vain.” But the character could also have taken a Lear Jet to Nova Scotia to see the eclipse of March 7, 1970. (I was stuck in Maine for that one, just outside the path of totality.)
On Prince Edward Island, my mother befriended a group of graduate students from Princeton whose backpacks bulged with telescopes and scientific equipment. Since I was into astronomy, she introduced me to them, and she invited them to come camp at her place in Maine on their way back to New Jersey.
These guys were eclipse chasers. They were already full of plans to travel to the big one in Africa the following summer. I’ll never know quite how I came to be included in those plans, but my third total eclipse was at sea, off the coast of Senegal.
I was not yet 16, hanging out with grad students, overseas for the first time. In Malaga, Spain, we boarded a French ferry along with other astronomy groups from other colleges for a chartered cruise that stopped in the Madeira Islands and the Canaries on the way to the eclipse, and Casablanca afterward.
Eclipses are longest near the equator, with the Earth near aphelion (farthest from the sun) and the moon near perigee (closest to the earth). On June 30, 1973, all those conditions applied. It was clear and calm, and you could hear the low hum of the boat’s stabilizers. The sky to the east was red with sand from the Sahara. Telescopes and cameras filled the decks. Totality lasted over seven minutes.
On February 26, 1979, I was in college in Beloit, Wisconsin. The Greyhound from Chicago stopped in Beloit and ran all the way to Winnipeg. Why not ride a bus up to the Canadian prairies in the middle of winter? I met a friend who came by train from Montreal. We watched the eclipse in a park, bundled to the ears. A cold, bright day got much colder when the sun went away. The return bus was filled with boisterous Americans bringing home memories and Canadian beer.
Nearly 40 years passed before the next one, August 21, 2017, in Missouri. I did see an annular eclipse (when the moon is not large enough to cover the sun’s disk) on January 4, 1992. That one was memorable because it happened at sunset on the California coast, and my young son and daughter watched it with me. So that’s five total, plus an annular and a couple of near-misses. They’ve all been spectacular. But if you’ve never seen one (and even if you have), it’s worth your time to get into the path of totality on April 8. There’s nothing like standing in the shadow of the moon to make you visually aware of your place in space, on a small world orbiting a star.