Eclipse-chasers, also known as ‘umbraphiles’, are a dedicated crew of scientists who travel the globe to catch a few moments in eerie darkness. Even after seeing dozens of eclipses, they say they can’t get enough.
“The sudden onset of twilight was so surreal and so electrifying,” recalled Fred Espenak of the first total solar eclipse he saw in the United States back in 1970.
Espenak, 65, a retired Nasa astrophysicist, has been to 27 eclipses, and seen 20 of them; weather interfered with the rest.
The most memorable, he says, was an eclipse he travelled to in India in 1995 with about 35 other people.
A woman in the group wept over how it had gone by so fast, lasting just 41 seconds.
“We stayed in contact,” Espenak said. “And to make a long story short, we got married.”
When the eclipse marches across the country on Monday, Espenak plans to be in Wyoming, operating 17 cameras.
Most people who see an eclipse will experience just a minute or two of darkness, but in 1973, Donald Liebenberg set a world record when he rode the Concorde jet and chased an eclipse at supersonic speed.
Now 85, he has spent more than two and a half hours of his life in totality, longer than anyone else on the planet.
He has travelled to Indonesia, Turkey, South Africa and Zambia, among other places, and seen 26 eclipses so far.
“Looking forward to the 27th,” said Liebenberg, an adjunct professor at Clemson University in South Carolina.
Glenn Schneider, an astronomer at the University of Arizona, saw his first total eclipse when he was 14.
“I realised this was the start of something that had changed my life, that I was going to have to see the next one. And the next one,” he said.
Total solar eclipses happen on average every 16 months on earth.
Schneider has missed only a handful.
He has plans for every future eclipse, including one over New York in May 2079 when he would be 123 years old.
“I don’t think I am going to make it but I’ve left information for my daughter for her to go and see it,” he said. — AFP
Kerry Sheridan
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