Day by day, media attention is intensifying for next Monday, when the Moon’s shadow will race from Oregon to South Carolina and trace a hundred-kilometer-wide path in which, from county to county and town to town, it will momentarily erase the Sun. On either side of that continent-crossing band of total solar obscuration, diminishing degrees of partial eclipse will spread to northernmost Canada and upper South America. How hard should eclipse watchers try to get to the totality zone?
Very hard, urges astronomer Jay Pasachoff of Williams College in Massachusetts. He chairs the International Astronomical Union’s Working Group on Solar Eclipses. On Monday he’ll be attending what his fellow astronomer Alan Hirshfeld calls a world-record 34th total eclipse. In the Washington Post op-ed “Americans have the chance to see something totally spectacular this month,” Pasachoff dismissed partial-eclipse viewing as merely “interesting.” He described the “dramatic glories” awaiting all who manage to watch from unclouded locations in the totality zone:
During the first hour of partial eclipse, which you can observe safely only through specially certified filters … you wouldn’t know that anything special was happening. But the last 15 minutes or so bring sharpening shadows, changes in the light, sometimes cooling winds and a darkening sky. Faint ripples on the ground, known as shadow bands, may cross the landscape. The most impressive part is the final minute: As the sun transitions from 99 percent to total coverage, the sky abruptly gets about 10,000 times darker.
Just before totality, at the rim of the sun, a crescent of sunlight becomes broken by mountains on the edge of the moon—the so-called Baily’s beads. The last bead gleams so brightly around the moon’s silhouette, as the sun’s spiky corona becomes visible, that the eclipse looks like a diamond ring in the sky.
At that point, your safety glasses become unusable, since they are too dark for totality. The corona is the same brightness as the full moon and is equally safe to look at with the naked eye. All around the moon, the glorious corona halo of the sun is visible, as are Jupiter and Venus and even a few stars elsewhere in the sky. The horizon glows red from the light outside the moon’s shadow.
Others share Pasachoff’s enthusiasm, especially for the imperative to get to the totality zone. Under the Wall Street Journal headline “The greatest show on Earth,” Hirshfeld, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, declared that “totality must be experienced in its all-enveloping splendor to be understood.” At Nature Astronomy, an editorial emphasized, “for those lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, nothing will happen for a few blissful minutes, and it will mean everything.” The New York Times editorial “A cosmic distraction from Earth’s troubles,” described by a Times editor as “poetic,” called the eclipse a “joyous event” offering “simple, wondrous fun.” It echoed the get-to-the-totality-zone imperative.
Time magazine ran the especially effusive essay “The true meaning of the Great American Eclipse.” It enthused that in “the clockwork cosmos … once in a while, there’s poetry in the machinery. Once in a while, the wheels click in synchrony and the indifferent universe offers up a rare spectacle.” On 15 August, the New York Times devoted half of its weekly Science Times section to enthusiastic articles about the eclipse. One of them, an essay by Dennis Overbye reminiscing about a half-century of eclipse experiences shared with Pasachoff, exulted that an eclipse means “communing with the essence of the cosmos”—and designated Corona as the “eclipse beer of choice.”
Eclipse planning resources
Time magazine’s enthusiasm shines especially in an elaboration on NASA’s impressively useful interactive online eclipse map, which shows eclipse times and the percentage of totality for any point on the continent. Someone in Washington, DC, for example, can learn from the NASA web tool that in Washington itself, obscuration will be 81%, with the partial eclipse starting at 1:18pm, reaching maximum at 2:42, and ending at 4:02. A person in Washington who wonders how much better the viewability will be in, say, Danville, Virginia—roughly halfway to the totality path’s center—will discern 92% obscuration. For people planning where to view the eclipse, Time’s contribution is a web tool that delivers a speedy animation of the total or partial eclipse as seen from any zip code that the planner specifies.
For the media and for eclipse participants generally, NASA offers a general overview page as well as a page on eye safety. “Homemade filters or ordinary sunglasses,” that page cautions, “even very dark ones, are not safe for looking at the sun; they transmit thousands of times too much sunlight.” NASA recommends ensuring that eclipse glasses or viewers come from a reliable supplier, as determined via the American Astronomical Society Reputable Vendors of Solar Filters & Viewers page.
NASA’s extensive web offerings extend to an eclipse history page that includes an archive of news articles from between 1800 and 1930. Reporters and media analysts can find, for example, a copy of the 1878 St. Louis Globe-Democrat article “Next Monday’s eclipse: What it is, and how and where the phenomenon can best be seen.” The article sounds a lot like today’s advance coverage for our own next Monday, though with more quantification and less hesitation to challenge readers with scientific complexity.
But journalists look further for their eclipse stories than NASA’s worthy, earnest information resources, sometimes finding odd or quirky stuff. National Public Radio posted a piece pointing out that in “only about 600 million years, the moon will look small enough that it no longer completely covers the sun, and whoever is left on Earth won’t see any more total solar eclipses.” It added, “So, get them while you can.” At the Wall Street Journal, the 9 August A-HED—the daily offbeat human-interest piece on the front page—reported on weddings being planned not for the usual Saturday or Sunday, but for eclipse Monday. This means lots of demand for the Bonnie Tyler song “Total Eclipse of the Heart” from the 1980s, the article said. (YouTube reports more than 300 million views for that song’s page, with nearly 50 000 online comments.) The Wall Street Journal also ran a column about the history of the word eclipse.
Infrastructure pushed to the limit
The coming eclipse’s practical effects, though no one confidently predicts them in fine detail, have drawn extensive press attention, and not just for the ubiquitous topic of eye safety. The word nightmare gets invoked for the traffic-congestion possibilities, as in the Time article “‘Biggest driver distraction of the century’: Officials brace for a solar eclipse traffic nightmare.” Time points out that Monday’s eclipse will cross 29 interstate highway routes, and that 99 years ago, when another total eclipse crossed the entire continent, Americans had only 6 million cars, against more than 263 million now. The only partially lighthearted Wall Street Journal op-ed “Oh no, here come the solar eclipse hordes” expressed dread for the coming invasion of Jackson, Wyoming. The piece lamented that “it will only take a few unkind and drunken strangers to create a nightmare scenario.” Overbye mentioned that Oregon is treating Monday as a rehearsal for future civil-defense disasters.
Fox News posted “Total solar eclipse expected to send ‘record crowds’ to US national parks, say officials.” The totality path reportedly contains 21 national parks. The Atlantic ran a piece called “Small towns prepare to cash in for the solar eclipse.” The New York Times front page carried a report that, in its online version, appeared beneath the headline “In total eclipse’s path, hope and uncertainty in rural Kentucky.” The subhead said, “Wickliffe, in western Kentucky, thought about cashing in on the eclipse by inviting viewers. But then its mayor started to worry about the crowds.”
Journalists at Fox and Gizmodo and elsewhere have looked at the intriguing, and maybe also troubling, question of the eclipse’s effect on the power grid. What happens when solar installations suddenly encounter midday darkness? Quartz called the challenge “not unmanageable,” but added that it has prompted utilities “to look for a solution to a new problem: managing grids increasingly reliant on solar power.”
Research opportunities
And then there’s the scientific research planned for the Great American Eclipse. In the Science Times, Kenneth Chang outlined the two-thousand-year tradition of exploiting eclipses for scientific study. In Nature Astronomy, Pasachoff outlined next Monday’s research opportunity, which a few reporters have been examining, or anyway mentioning, in the media. Pasachoff noted the primacy of coronal science (as engaged deeply in the Physics Today article “Why is the Sun’s corona so hot? Why are prominences so cool?”). He summarized:
Only on the days of total solar eclipses is a complete view of the solar atmosphere visible, from the photosphere to the outer parts of the heliosphere through the chromosphere and the lower and middle corona. Heliophysicists have such occasions available about every 18 months somewhere in the world. But the logistic advantages of the 2017 total solar eclipse’s 100-km-wide path crossing the United States, with associated special funding from US organizations, is leading to tremendous amounts of equipment being constructed or updated, to better test prior ideas of the solar corona’s dynamics and heating as well as new theoretical models.
The planned research extends beyond heliophysics. Occasionally press reports mention past and planned studies of eclipse effects on animals, humans, and plants. A Science Times article about measurements to be made from airplanes quoted Madhulika Guhathakurta, NASA’s lead scientist for the 2017 eclipse: “Just as it takes a village to raise a child,” she observed, “I would say that it takes the entire USA to really gather the information of various kinds—scientific, psychology, animal behavior—to really fully understand how intimately we are connected to our star.”
Some of that effort involves citizen scientists, as reported by Nature in the article “Citizen scientists chase total solar eclipse: Non-scientists are being recruited to collect data on everything from the Sun’s outer atmosphere to animal behaviour.” Among non-heliophysics eclipse-research projects, Nature mentioned Life Responds, in which citizen scientists will observe and record animal reactions, and Eclipse Soundscapes, in which they will collect audio of wildlife in urban and rural settings.
At the Wall Street Journal, Robert Lee Hotz called the eclipse “an experiment in solar physics conducted on a national scale” as citizen scientists join researchers who will be using balloons, satellites, airplanes, and telescopes. Hotz noted that astrophysicist Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science, sees the Sun as “the Rosetta Stone of all stars.” Hotz also quoted Carrie Black of NSF: “We are expecting that millions of people will get involved. Images and data collected from this will be analyzed for years to come.”
Hotz reported on organized citizen-science efforts including:
- The Citizen Continental-America Telescopic Eclipse Experiment, which will gather images of the inner solar corona.
- The Eclipse Megamovie Project, in which more than 1000 photographers and amateur astronomers, working with Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory and Google’s Making & Science initiative, will seek to show how the corona changes over time.
- The International Occultation Timing Association’s project to calculate the Sun’s diameter by measuring the width of the Moon’s shadow.
- The George Mason University EclipseMob project, which believes itself to be history’s biggest crowdsourced ionosphere experiment.
Pasachoff sums up at the end of his heartfelt Washington Post op-ed by promoting a special dimension of next Monday’s citizen science:
The most important scientific outcome … may be more fundamental: inspiring a 7- or 8-year-old girl or boy somewhere to enter a career of science, perhaps even leading to a fantastically wonderful discovery 20 or 30 years from now. Seeing the event on a TV or computer screen simply won’t do. Our future scientists need to see it outside with their own eyes. It might just be the key to some hitherto unimaginable breakthrough benefiting all the people of the world.
Steven T. Corneliussen is Physics Today’s media analyst. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
