In pursuit of awe: Why we travel to chase the moon and the stars

The moon had slipped between Earth and the sun, sucked daylight out of the air in a matter of seconds and punched a black hole in the sky, leaving only the wisps of the sun’s corona glowing around its edges.

One minute and 52 seconds later, the apparition disappeared. And another few minutes after that, I had 8 April 2024 clocked in my mental calendar: The date of the next total solar eclipse to hit North America. Whatever it took, I needed to see that again.

Those two minutes had been over a year in the making. It started when my husband insisted that we book a hotel on the Oregon Coast for a total solar eclipse on 21 August 2017. “It’s going to sell out,” he insisted. I swore to him I’d seen a solar eclipse before. I didn’t think it was that big a deal. I remember, as a kid, standing in the schoolyard to observe it through a cardboard box-turned-pinhole projector. What I don’t recall is seeing anything. Certainly nothing worth booking a trip for a year out.

That was different, he told me. That wasn’t a total eclipse; I’d remember if it was. This stretch of the Oregon Coast would be in the eclipse’s path of totality, which sounded like the name of a sci-fi movie I’d happily pass on. He said everyone within a 100-mile radius would descend into the 70-mile-wide path of totality that would span the entire contiguous United States. Traffic jams would bring roads to a standstill. I doubt it, I thought, but I’m always up for a road trip.

A year later, the media had started to buzz with descriptions and images of this ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ experience. Whatever I’d seen in the schoolyard as a kid was not this. We packed our one-year-old daughter into the car and headed south from our home in Vancouver, British Columbia.

“It is absolutely preordained in time and space that [the eclipse] will happen in this way, at this place, at this time, and there is nothing you can do about it. It is completely out of human control and that, I think, is something that’s a good thing to know—that we are not in control of lots of things. Nature has its own clockwork.”

- Dr John Mason, physicist and astronomer

On the 21st, we woke up under blue-bird skies in, yes, a no-vacancy motel. We set up chairs on the beach among a small and growing crowd. We all sat with our backs to the ocean, heads turned to the sun in the east, faces unabashedly adorned with dorky eclipse glasses. There was a buzz in the air. Then a hint of fog in the air. Then more fog. As the moon started to slide in front of the sun, we were fully fogged in. We debated getting in the car and heading inland as many others got in theirs. The roads will be jammed, my husband said. I mean, I still doubted it, but I also knew we couldn’t risk it.

So we sought higher ground in the motel parking lot and hoped for the best along with a small group of guests who decided to stick it out. Though I’d had little interest when we planned the trip, as an incorrigible overthinker (some might say control freak), I couldn’t handle the fact that our diligent planning might go so spectacularly tits-up at the eleventh hour.

Leave it to the cosmos

Dr John Mason knows this stress well, and it’s part of what makes the experience of chasing eclipses so addictive. He saw his first total solar eclipse in Java, Indonesia, in 1983 and has seen 19 more since then. Throughout his career as an astronomer in the south of England, he’s been hosting travelers on eclipse trips around the world for decades, recently in partnership with Intrepid.

When I catch up with him and ask him why he thinks we’re fascinated by total solar eclipses, he says he thinks it comes down to that same lack of control that had me pacing in a parking lot in Oregon. “It is absolutely preordained in time and space that [the eclipse] will happen in this way, at this place, at this time, and there is nothing you can do about it,” he says. “It is completely out of human control and that, I think, is something that’s a good thing to know—that we are not in control of lots of things. Nature has its own clockwork.”

“It’s an incredible coincidence that the moon is 400 times smaller than the sun, but it’s 400 times closer [to Earth], and so it can, at times, exactly occlude the sun. In a billion years’ time, as the moon moves away, that won’t be happening anymore.”

While eclipses are fascinatingly predictable, the weather between us and them is largely unpredictable, which is another part of the allure. “You’ve got to be in the right place at the right time with a clear sky, and you only need a few minutes of cloud at that crucial moment, and you’ve missed it. The stress is quite high. The adrenaline flows.”

Up above the world so high

Outside the motel, the fog seemed to dissipate, and I was able to watch the moon slide in front of the sun through my glasses. I started to sense some element of the depth of the universe, or at least the infinitesimal section between Earth and our closest star. Normally our perception of space is a bit like a projection on a flat screen. There’s here on Earth, our sky just above and then there’s everything else out there.

Even in pictures of a total solar eclipse, the moon appears to sit right on the sun. In person, I felt a new perception of ‘in between’. There was us, then millions of miles away the sun and, suspended in the darkness and emptiness in between (really quite close if you think about it) an enormous sphere of moon drifting silently, slowly, at over 2240 miles per hour (3600 km/h), in between us.

Watching that video back stirs something in me. I think it’s the feeling that made me whisper wow in a way I so rarely do. But the tiny black dot surrounded by a white glow at the top of the frame gets nowhere near mimicking what we saw in the sky that day. And then the video cuts … The video doesn’t do it justice, but it doesn’t need to.

Yet despite the distance between these spheres and the supersonic speeds at which they’re all whizzing in orbits and whirling on axes, everything appeared to happen so gradually. It took over an hour from the moon’s first ‘contact’ with the sun until it centered itself in front of it.

When it got there, the moon’s shadow that cast us in a dusk normally reserved for daybreak and nightfall was racing across the continent at about 1490 miles per hour (2400 km/h). Street lights flicked on.

Inside the shadow, time, space and velocity all somehow collided in a way that gave me nearly two minutes to stare in awe, pulling my consciousness off Earth for a moment. I felt like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s cover illustration of The Little Prince standing on his home planet, asteroid B-612—feet planted, head punched into space, eyes level with the moon, everything wildly out of scale when considered in earthly terms. When your grown-up head gets pulled away from Earth like that, you can’t help but start to see that the hat really is a boa constrictor that swallowed an elephant.

The allure of cosmic coincidences

Some say moments like this provide irrefutable evidence of a higher power. As though this crossing of paths could not have been merely a fluke of science; it had to have been orchestrated. The idea that, to my atheist mind, this is not the work of a conductor, that it is indeed a beautiful mathematical coincidence that we can show the work for, is even more compelling.

“I don’t see the need to invoke a superior being or power,” Dr Mason says. “It’s not necessary. The cosmic clockwork is amazing in its own right.” Still, after seeing 20 of these, Dr Mason says that while every eclipse looks and feels a bit different, the feeling of awe never goes away. He recalls the most emotional he’s gotten watching an eclipse—in 1994 on the Chilean Altiplano.

“We were at nearly 14,000 feet on the border between Chile and Bolivia,” he recalls. “At that altitude, your mind is starved of oxygen, and you can’t think straight. We got up there to this sort of ancient landscape atop the Andes, and there’s a bit of cloud about and the eclipse was unbelievable. It went really dark during totality, so much darker than I’d ever seen before or since, and the shape of the eclipse sun—it had the dark disc and then there were two coronal streamers like horns. Then a long streamer, like a beard, and it was like an image of the devil. And the hairs on the back of your neck stood up. It’s nothing you could control. It’s a primitive thing.”

“It’s like a drug in a way,” he says. “And then as soon as it’s over, you want to see the next one.”

The next fix

On 8 April 2024, I stood next to a lake in the village of Ayer’s Cliff, Quebec, just north of Vermont. The second Great American Eclipse of the past decade was careening across the US-Mexico border northeastwards to where I’d stationed myself smack in the center of the path of totality with my husband, our daughter, now eight years old, and her younger sister. I’d spent weeks prior studying weather forecasts, down to cloud cover and barometric pressure predictions, and despite the region’s springtime propensity for cloudy skies, we lucked into a clear one.

I have a video of the moment totality begins. In the final 30 seconds of the moon and sun lining up, I flit between being a mum who wants to protect her kids’ eyeballs and letting my head shoot into the ether. As daylight rapidly drains from the scene, the small crowd around us erupts into hoots, oohs and aahs. A pinprick of a black spot emerges where the sun just was.

‘OK! OK!’ I shout to my kids from the ground, far too loud considering how close I am to them.

‘Wow,’ I whisper from somewhere miles above Earth.

‘OK guys, take your glasses off!’ I say to my kids back on the ground, who had taken their glasses off three seconds before, not that I’d noticed. ‘Take your glasses off!’

‘Wow!’ I repeat back in the ether.

“We can’t spend our lives looking at everything on our phones, on our telly. You’ve got to experience it for yourself, whether it’s looking at a total eclipse or the northern lights or standing looking out over the Grand Canyon.”

- Dr John Mason, physicist and astronomer

Watching that video back stirs something in me. I think it’s the feeling that made me whisper wow in a way I so rarely do. But the tiny black dot surrounded by a white glow at the top of the frame gets nowhere near mimicking what we saw in the sky that day. And then the video cuts.

I remember willing my eyes to open as wide as they could and imprint this view onto my retinas, my brain. The horizon in all directions was twilight blue, lit by a panoramic orange sunset. Venus appeared in the darkness below the sun and moon. The corona was different this time—wider, reachier, wispier and so crisp and so big. A magenta spot protruded from the edge of the black abyss—a solar prominence only visible during a total eclipse, if you’re lucky. I had three-and-a-half minutes this time, which felt like much less, and then a sliver of sun snuck out the bottom right side and swallowed the moon. The whole thing disappeared and the day returned.

The video doesn’t do it justice, but it doesn’t need to.

“The wonderful thing about the human body, and particularly the human eye, is that it’s able to take in an enormous amount with its view,” Dr Mason says. “And your smell, your hearing, everything else is taking in other things, and we’re processing that information at a staggering rate… Photos do not capture anything more than a snapshot. They don’t capture the feeling, the emotion, the surroundings, the sounds.”

“We often think that, you know, there are people who ought to take in a more wide view of the universe,” he continues. “But so many people are so just wrapped up in how much money they’ve got, how much land they’ve got, how much property they’ve got. [For them] it’s not about the universe as a whole. I’m just one tiny, tiny cog in it. And that’s the thing that matters—that you are very insignificant. No matter who you are, you are very insignificant and that is important for people to know. Unfortunately, some of the people who ought to know that don’t and perhaps don’t take the trouble to put themselves in that position.”

The same compulsion that has propelled me around this planet to see what’s here has drawn me to parts of it just to see what’s happening out there, above that spot at that moment.

“We can’t spend our lives looking at everything on our phones, on our telly,” he says. “You’ve got to experience it for yourself, whether it’s looking at a total eclipse or the northern lights or standing looking out over the Grand Canyon. Be there. Do it. Don’t experience it through your phone or the telly. Because, as human beings, we’re more than that. If we lose that, we lose the very element of our soul.”

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