The Faroe Islands are an archipelago of eighteen glacier-carved specks floating on the cold, gray waves of the North Atlantic. Their jagged mountains stretch out of the sea to catch the rain-filled clouds blown over from far-off Iceland. Everywhere I look, water tumbles down treeless slopes of volcanic rock, gathering into pools and waterfalls that pour back into the surf below. When the Sun finally does break free from the overhead gloom, the cascades come alive and burst with rainbows, while sunbeams race across the mountaintops. The British, no strangers to harsh weather, call this the Land of Maybe. Upon arrival, I have a hard time believing this is where I’ve traveled to see a total solar eclipse.
It won’t be the first total eclipse seen here by the descendants of the Norsemen who once fished these waters. One of the oldest stories the islanders tell is of four brothers from the southernmost of the islands, Suðuroy, who may have witnessed the total eclipse of May 30, 1612:
They were brave and strong, but they were constantly quarrelling and fighting, and sometimes even threatening to take each other’s lives. One day, when they were out in the hills tending their sheep, darkness suddenly fell upon them. They were terrified and promised God that if they survived they would change and become better men. Soon afterwards, the sun came out again, and legend has it they hugged each other and never fought nor quarreled again for the rest of their lives.
—NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE FAROE ISLANDS
Having experienced the power of an eclipse with full warning of what to expect, I can believe its power to change lives when wholly unexpected. The eclipse this time, on March 20, 2015, will be far from a surprise to the 50,000 people who call these islands home. Over the past three days, an additional 11,000 eclipse-chasers have descended upon the islands; each is eager to see what was once a subject of terror, but has now become one of tourism. The lone total solar eclipse of 2015 has not made it easy for the ever-growing throngs of “coronaphiles” to reach their moment in the Moon’s shadow. Totality touches land in only two places this time, the Faroe Islands at latitude 62o north, halfway between Scotland and Iceland, and the even more remote islands of Svalbard, 80o north latitude off the coast of northern Norway (total population: 1,200, not including the polar bears).
Based on the latest weather broadcast from Denmark—the only one I’m getting with English subtitles—the omnipresent clouds are forecast to break sometime around the moment of totality, give or take an hour. I’m told the chances are better in the northwestern part of the islands, the direction from which the winds blow, so I have positioned myself on the literal edge of the archipelago as far north and west as one can go. Thus I find myself sitting on a wooden bench built to stare out to sea along dramatic thousand-foot-tall volcanic cliffs teaming with seabirds. The sound of the distant surf is faint below me and the sense of being at World’s End profound—it’s as if here the Creator ran out of rock and simply quit. Beyond my perch, nothing more than a few jagged islands dot the northwestern horizon, while beyond them is the open sea.
For most eclipse-chasers, the goal in picking a spot from which to view an eclipse is to optimize the combination of clear skies and proximity to the central line of totality. Being as close to the central line as possible maximizes the minutes, and even seconds, of darkness. But in the Faroe Islands, a land of tall mountains and deep valleys, it’s crucial to find a spot where the morning Sun is guaranteed to be above the surrounding hills while eclipsed. Michael Zeiler, an expert in systems of graphical information, has created gorgeous maps of the Faroes revealing the sunlight and shadow across the landscape at the moment of totality. I’ve seen them everywhere on the islands these past few days; locals and tourists alike pore over them debating the perfect spot from which to see the Sun. I’ve found my sunny spot at the top of a sheep meadow overlooking the tiny town of Gásadalur on the western island of Vágar. Whether it will be free of clouds is beyond the power of Zeiler’s maps to promise.
It’s an article of faith among eclipse-chasers that the ideal eclipse-viewing spots are those with access to easy mobility so that viewers can quickly drive in one direction or another depending on the clouds. My meadow, unfortunately, sits at the end of a one-kilometer-long, one-lane tunnel through the surrounding mountains. Quick movement is out of the question. Besides, the weather changes so quickly here that expert eclipse-chaser (and psychologist) Dr. Kate Russo claims the best strategy is to find your place and stick with it: “This eclipse will be for those with nerves of steel,” she warned after spending a month in these islands, watching the changing weather each day at the time totality is forecast to occur.
As I wait, I look over my shoulder to see yet another squall come ashore; it drenches me, and at two hours until the eclipse begins, I remind myself: nerves of steel. It took me more than twenty-five hours of nonstop air travel on progressively smaller airlines to reach these islands and then drive my rental car (one of the last available) to the house of my host, Lis Mortensen. Mortensen is a curator from Jarðfeingi, the Earth and Energy Directorate, with exhibitions at the local National Museum in Torshavn, the capital of the Faroe Islands. She has created an exhibit on solar eclipses, their causes, and local history (the Faroe Islands are their own country, but officially also part of the Kingdom of Denmark). “I felt it was important and that people would want to come learn about the eclipse,” Mortensen told me. “Now that the eclipse has gotten close, it’s set attendance records. Everyone wants to know what they’ll see and where to go to see it.”
It’s important to remember how recent a change this is. For all but the past few hundred years of human history, solar eclipses were seen only by those who happened to live within totality’s path. The Faroe Islands are no exception. When a total solar eclipse crossed these islands in 1954, the population was still largely isolated from the rest of the world. Radio had only recently come to the islands, and if not for the work of Niels Pauli Holm, a Faroese ophthalmologist, no one would have known what was about to happen and how to observe it. As an expression of the uncertainty and confusion leading up to the 1954 eclipse, Mortensen’s exhibit quotes the experience of a young Faroes girl at the time: “I went home and my mother asked me to collect the clothes from the clothes-line. She was afraid that the clothes would burn. People were talking about total destruction, and I remember that people frequently visiting us talked about it. We were asked: ‘What are you going to do?’ We didn’t have any answer to this, looking uneasily at each other. . . . [The old people] were afraid the houses would be destroyed.”
The mood is noticeably different now than it would have been then. The streets are filled with tourists, and restaurants and bars all over town feature signs offering limited-edition solar eclipse beer and special fish burgers with homemade tartar sauce. These signs are in English and Dutch as well as Faroese, a language related to Icelandic but spoken only by the people who live here. It is one of many languages in danger of disappearing in our global Internet age, and this eclipse has posed a problem, as there are no Faroese words for a number of the phenomena associated with the eclipse. Wary of letting the language adopt too many English (or worse, Danish) words and losing its heritage altogether, the locals search for analogous Icelandic words to express what we’ve all come to see: Sólarmyrking, the solar eclipse.
Sitting on my bench in this meadow, I am astounded by the number of languages I hear from the eclipse-chasers: Greek, German, French, and more that I can’t identify. The Greek eclipse-chasers comment that after a week in the islands I am the first American they have heard. The joy they show seems to indicate that I’ve given them an advantage in some sort of nationality-bingo game to which I am not privy. My twenty-five hours of traveling also appear to have set a new record for this crowd. But once you’ve seen totality, traveling halfway around the globe just isn’t too far to see it again.
The very first person to travel to see a total solar eclipse—the world’s first eclipse-chaser—appears to be Monsieur le Chevalier de Louville, a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris. He traveled to London to see the total solar eclipse of April 22, 1715, that was predicted by Edmond Halley. Halley was famous for using his friend Isaac Newton’s laws of motion to predict the courses of the Moon and comets as well as the dates, times, and places of eclipses both future and past. According to his calculations, this would be the first eclipse to pass over London in 575 years. As one of the first to have its exact time and location predicted (not counting the stories of Miletus of Thales 2,000 years before), odds are this was the first one for which an avid enthusiast could make definite travel plans.
At that time, before the invention of the telescopes and cameras that coronaphiles are setting up around me, the most useful instrument the public had at their disposal for recording an eclipse was the pendulum clock. Halley made use of this fact to refine his orbit for the Moon and perfect future eclipse predictions. In the weeks before the eclipse, Halley sent out broadsides to be posted across the country asking for anyone who could see totality to record its duration using their clock and let him know their results. The map of those who saw totality, as well as the time and duration of its occurrence across the countryside, would determine the exact position and motion of the Moon’s shadow, and thus its path around the Earth.
The public was asked to take part in an almost identical act of citizen-science 210 years later in New York City. On the morning of January 24, 1925, a total solar eclipse was predicted to sweep across the state of New York, with the southern edge of its band splitting the island of Manhattan into those who could see totality and the solar corona and those who couldn’t. Astronomers from several northeastern universities, including Yale, Princeton, and Cornell, sought to use data from the eclipse to refine their calculations for the size and orbit of the Moon; the data would also enable them to solve some as yet unexplained discrepancies in the time and duration of recent eclipses. Articles filled the local newspapers urging the public to go out and witness the celestial event from their rooftops, from street corners—from wherever they had a view of the Sun—and report back what they saw. The headline and story in the New York Times for the morning of January 20 read:
SCIENTISTS ASK AID OF LAITY IN ECLIPSE
Public’s Observations Along Edge of Shadow
Counted On for Important Data.
MAY SOLVE MOON’s SHIFTS
If the weather is clear, one of the features of greatest interest for Manhattan will be the determination of the exact line which separates the total eclipse from the partial eclipse. This line is expected to occur somewhere between 110th Street and Seventy-second Street. An observer north of the line will see everything—the complete blackening of the sun’s disk, the piercing through of the brighter stars and planets, the thin red rim about the sun, the delicate tree-like scarlet “prominences” outside on the red rim and the pearl-tinted lines of the corona extending in all directions away from the sun.
Amateur photographers and observers in Manhattan will have a chance to help clear up one of the most difficult scientific questions about the eclipse. By fixing the exact line which separates the total eclipse from the partial eclipse, they can establish the exact diameter of the moon and the exact course of the moon. . . .
While the observer is surer of seeing all the heavenly sights by taking a position north of 110th Street, he will have the excitement of engaging in cosmic detective work if he stays in the doubtful zone between Seventy-second Street and 110th Street and studies the shadow effects from his rooftop.
The article claimed that the edge of totality in a solar eclipse had not crossed a great population center like New York City since the invention of the camera for astronomical use. Never before could so many people with so many cameras photograph an eclipse from along totality’s edge, capturing in the process a phenomenon that, though seen innumerable times before, had never been named. Whether as a result of the wealth on display in Manhattan’s shops, or merely a reflection of the roaring excess of the 1920s itself, the name they gave was perfect and continues to be used to describe what for me is the highlight of every eclipse: the diamond ring.
Witnesses that day remarked in great numbers on the incredible beauty of that final instant before the Sun was totally extinguished. At that moment, one last ray of the solar disk would have shone down a lunar valley along its limb and produced a brilliant pinprick of light set in the luminous ring of the just-emerging corona. A headline in the New York Times three days after the eclipse read: “THAT ‘DIAMOND RING’ IN THE SUN’S ECLIPSE: A Remarkable Photograph Taken at Saugerties Seems to Prove it No Illusion.”
Each total eclipse displays two such rings, one at totality’s start, the other at its conclusion; to my mind the second always seems most beautiful as a final punctuation on the spectacle just finished. Of the roughly 6 million people living in New York City in 1925, those in Manhattan right along the southern edge of the shadow would have seen a totality of no more than an instant—consisting of a single diamond ring—the jewel-like gleam of the Sun never fully hidden.aa Because winters are cold in New York and the forecast was for snow the day of totality, an unusual plan was put in motion for a fleet of twenty-five airplanes (including a dirigible) to take to the sky with cameras and other instruments. They were to record the moments of totality and broadcast their results through a constant stream of radio commentary to the public below. A Times reporter captured the drama of the largest formation of airplanes to fly across New York since the end of the Great War only six years before:
As the machines winged toward their destinations, the shadow [of the Moon] grew larger, while Major Hensley, his lips only an inch or two from the microphone, told the millions within radio distance what was going on. . . . Looking from the cockpit of [his] airplane, the observers saw the shadows deepening over Long Island Sound and the Connecticut shore. Far off on the horizon, at the extreme northerly edge of the shadow, a play of soft green, purple and deep blue light could be seen. . . . Then came totality and with it the darkness of night. . . . Higher and a little to the right the planets Mercury, Venus and Jupiter glowed with a soft blue light as they burst into prominence with the dimming of the greater luminary. . . . The pilots of the machines, though their minds were intent on their jobs, found times to gaze on the spectacle. The scientists in the cockpits were enraptured. They saw the eclipse under conditions that no others had ever experienced.
The novelty of the eclipse was also communicated to the public through moving pictures taken from Yale Observatory in New Haven, Connecticut, and then sent by airplane to New York City so that they could be playing in theaters on Broadway by that afternoon. Airplanes play an even larger role in eclipse-chasing today. As I sit at the edge of the Faroe Islands I can see blue sky coming over the horizon, and can only pray that it gets here in time. Above me, however, are thirty specially chartered airplanes full of passengers with no need to worry about what the weather will bring. Three of them are Boeing 737 jet airliners that took off from Iceland to be here at totality, while three private, nearly supersonic jets have flown from Paris and Geneva, Switzerland. At the moment of totality, they will literally turn to chase the Moon at nine-tenths the speed of sound: fast enough to prolong totality from the two-minute, twenty-second event I hope to see from land to almost four minutes.
They are not the first to prolong totality in this way. The record for the longest duration of darkness is held by the supersonic Concorde, which as a mere prototype in 1973 was chartered by an international group of scientists to streak across Africa during an eclipse. From an altitude of 55,000 feet, the sky was black and the curvature of the Earth clearly visible, as was the shadow of the Moon beneath them. The Concorde traveled at a speed of almost 1,300 miles per hour, about twice the speed of sound and the same as the speed of the Moon’s shadow moving across the Earth, stretching the view from the ground—an exceptionally long seven minutes—to an astounding seventy-four minutes of totality in the sky.
Older coronaphiles tell me that the 1970s was the decade when commercial eclipse-chasing really began. The first public cruise ship chartered to see a total eclipse of the Sun occurred in 1972 (nine hundred miles off the coast of New York in the western Atlantic), the same year as the release of the Carly Simon song “You’re So Vain,” in which the unnamed subject of the song flew his “Learjet up to Nova Scotia to see the total eclipse of the sun.” The first commercial flight for amateur solar eclipse-chasers was an Ansett Airlines flight chartered out of Perth, Australia, in 1974: all the seats were removed from the left side of the plane so photographers could set up cameras and telescopes to look out the small windows.
Public interest in eclipse-chasing has grown exponentially in the decades since. In 2001, Doug Duncan, an astronomer, educator, and longtime eclipse-chaser, planned to charter the Concorde to reproduce the extreme-duration 1973 eclipse, but this time for members of the general public who could afford the cost. At $10,000 a seat, it was only marginally more expensive than a typical Concorde flight, but given the position of the Sun low in the sky, passengers would see totality perfectly framed in the Concorde’s tiny windows for the entire hour-and-a-half flight across the Atlantic. Unfortunately, the Concorde that he was in the process of chartering was the one that crashed upon take-off in 2000, after which the fleet was grounded, never to fly again.
Chartering cruise ships for eclipse-chasing was no less difficult. “They wouldn’t give me the time of day for two years,” Duncan told me when he tried to find a Mediterranean cruise line that was willing to alter course by a hundred miles to intersect totality off the Greek Islands in 2006. “Then finally, a year before the eclipse, they came back and said to me, ‘We don’t understand why, but a lot of people want to be on a ship going to where you want to go. So we’ll let you have a third of our ship. Send us a non-refundable deposit of $100,000 by the end of the month and it is yours.’” Duncan had to take all of his savings and another mortgage on his house, but he paid the deposit and nearly filled the ship: “I ended up taking 402 people,” he said. “I hired 10 astronomers to speak, and I ran a kids program for 50 people, and all the kids were flying kites off the back of the cruise ship. It was glorious.” Today, every eclipse that crosses any sizable body of water is almost guaranteed to pass over a cruise ship carrying an array of expert speakers for the crowds, including astronauts, astronomers, and scientific authors. In fact, there are nine ships in and around the Faroe Islands today for this eclipse.
The most dramatic solar eclipse I’ve ever seen was on just such an eclipse cruise across the Atlantic in the fall of 2013. It was from the deck of a four-masted luxury sailing ship, the Star Flyer, sailing from Spain to Barbados, and I was a speaker. Nearly the entire ship had been booked, and so the cruise line agreed to alter course and intercept the Moon’s shadow for the forty-two seconds that totality would be visible from off the coast of Africa 20 degrees north of the equator. It took a full week of sailing out of the Canary Islands under nothing more than billowing white clouds and baby-blue skies. In an almost eerie counterexample to what I am experiencing today, the day of totality was the only day that dawned cloudy. But with masterful sailing by our captain, at the last moment before totality we managed to reach the lone break in the clouds. The Sun disappeared behind the Moon at the exact instant we crested a wave and broke free of the gloom. Clutching the rigging with one hand and my hat with the other, I was enthralled, the moment made all the more special by its brevity and a horizon circled with storm clouds and rain in every direction but the one that mattered.
Back in the Faroes, one of the people in the air overhead is Bárður Eklund from the Visit Faroe Islands tourism board. He hangs from the open door of a helicopter photographing the Moon’s shadow racing across the cloud-tops. Dr. Kate Russo, the eclipse-chasing psychologist, has been working with the tourism board and others on the islands for over a year, using her experience to help prepare the community for what is about to happen here.
Eclipse-chasing scientists haven’t always had a very good record of sharing the beauty of what they have come to see with the people who actually live there. The Faroes eclipse of 1954 took place during the start of the Cold War, when the islands were an early warning station for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). A small team of American scientists traveled here to study the eclipse, and the only record they left is a tiny plate on a stone in the village of Lopra with this inscription: “Solar Eclipse Expedition 30 June 1954 US Air Force.” That is par for the course for many of the solar eclipse expeditions stretching back through the 1800s. Local populations were viewed as a source of free labor (at best), and a potential source of danger and theft (at worse).
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, a former deputy editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, has researched the intersection of Victorian-era eclipse expeditions, tourism, and the people whom eclipse-chasers encountered. He describes the racist attitude held by many Western scientists when on expedition, writing that, “before an eclipse, [local] crowds were merely troublesome, but during an eclipse they were far more dangerous: stirred up by jealous priests, shackled by ancient superstitions, constitutionally incapable of the same kinds of self-control on which Europeans prided themselves, they threatened to revert to savagery under the enormous emotional pressures of totality.” The solar astronomer Norman Lockyer, referring to his 1871 eclipse expedition, reported that his observations could have been ruined by “the smoke of [Hindu] sacrificial fires, . . . if there had not been a strong force of military and police present to extinguish them.” Moreover, he wrote, “in Egypt, in 1882, without the protection of soldiers, a crowd of Egyptians would have invaded the camp.”
This was the era that saw the beginning of a professional traveling class. This was the new class of tourists who could afford months, if not years, on the road and who were well moneyed, well educated, and well read. They were encouraged to read up on the geology, flora, and fauna (and occasionally the people and customs) of their exotic destinations. The same railroads and steamships that made worldwide travel possible—as well as the rise of institutions like tourist hotels, travel agencies, and travel literature to cater to Victorian tourists—were indispensable for the new eclipse expeditions, and the members of those expeditions were often drawn from the same well-connected leisure class. The attitudes of the scientists toward the local inhabitants they encountered therefore mirrored the attitudes as a whole of the Victorian Age: “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.”
Having seen multiple eclipses myself, it is my fervent belief, as it is others’, that eclipses should be enjoyed by everyone fortunate enough to be in the path of totality, not just the scientists or the dedicated tourists who have come to see them. Today, Dr. Russo is leading this charge to share totality’s beauty beyond the crowds of already excited eclipse-chasers. Back in 2013, two years before the eclipse that has brought us both here, she arrived in the islands to work with local officials and spread the word about what would occur: “I really thought it was important to be a part of the community,” she told me, “being here, building it up, sharing it with the community, not just being an eclipse-chaser, coming in, seeing it, and going.”
She had experienced what it was like to be a part of the local community during an eclipse in 2012, when totality touched her native Queensland on the northeastern coast of Australia. Living abroad, she had returned there to promote her book Total Addiction, about the psychology of seeing an eclipse. “I had gotten there a month before and I was doing a survey of people before and after the eclipse,” she said. “There was nobody on the ground in North Queensland who had actually seen an eclipse before.” People who lived there were talking about leaving, not even staying to see the eclipse because they were so worried about the influx of tourists. “Oh no,” Russo thought. “This is coming to your community; you need to be here.” She started going to markets, community groups, and schools to give talks, and she made herself available for radio and TV interviews as someone who had seen what an eclipse was like. “And the more I did,” she said, “the more interest there was, because once you’ve seen an eclipse and start talking about it you can’t help but become excited.”
The great fear for Russo, as it is for me, is that for those who talk about eclipses without ever seeing one—the local officials, the radio hosts, and the TV reporters that flood the airwaves in every metropolitan community before totality—the passion with which the experience grabs you as a physical thing is difficult to understand before the fact. They can leave the public with a distorted view of what an eclipse will be. At best, they may suggest it is some sort of scientific novelty, an educational event that is worth seeing if you are free at the time. At worst, they may leave their viewers with the impression that eclipses are for new-age oddballs, and that making the effort to see an eclipse is something only slightly demented people do. This is understandable; if you haven’t seen one yourself, you can’t help but not understand the experience.
It’s for that reason that Russo now travels to eclipse communities to share her knowledge of what the experience is like. A year before the eclipse in the Faroes, she and Geoff Sims, an eclipse-chaser with a PhD in meteorology from Australia, set up a citizen-science project asking local Faroese to photograph the sky where they live at exactly 9:40 a.m. (the time of the eclipse) every day for a month to compare with local weather statistics, so that they would be able to gauge the chances of clear skies at different points across the islands on eclipse day. In February 2015, a month before totality, Russo returned to the islands to work with the tourism office as well as local media, schools, museums, businesses, and artists. Their goal was to develop and disseminate information for tourists and locals alike on where to go, what to look for, how to see it safely, and how to ensure that as many people as possible could share the moment together. “A year ago,” she said, “even when they were thinking that maybe no more than 5,000 people would be traveling to the islands to see the eclipse, that still left 50,000 people here who needed to know what was happening.”
In my week before the eclipse, I heard about her efforts firsthand on the local radio. I learned about one community where a hospital scheduled no surgeries so staff could pop outside for twenty minutes to see the lead-up to totality. Elsewhere, schools made plans to let students stay home with their families to enjoy the experience together, while in other communities, the local schools became the center of the community event.
Russo became interested in eclipse-chasing in 1999 when she witnessed her first solar eclipse on the coast of France, having traveled there by bus from Belfast to see it. At that same moment, I, too, had been experiencing my first total eclipse, but a little farther along totality’s path, in central Hungary. For both of us, it was a profoundly moving experience. She calls us “Saros Siblings,” a term she’s coined for those of us who have shared in this new experience during the same eclipse. It’s no accident that the first hotel room in the Faroes was booked for this eclipse back in 1999 almost immediately after that event. Evidently, another Saros Sibling of ours felt the need to see the corona again and didn’t want to miss out on a chance to get a room. In 2017, there will be at least 9 million new Saros Siblings as people flock to totality’s path in the United States.
Back on my clifftop, I’m still sitting on my chosen wooden bench. There are now more than a dozen of us. We’ve set up our cameras and are swapping stories of eclipses seen and missed because of weather. It’s no one’s first eclipse: some have seen five or eight; one gentleman has even seen seventeen total eclipses in his travels around the world. Far from satiating their desire, like checking an item off a bucket list, it has left each person wanting to see more. What will it be like in the United States when instead of a dozen we have ten thousand viewers all gathered in one location?
The blue sky is suddenly upon us, and as the clouds part overhead, we can see the eclipse is already underway. The excitement is palpable; it’s what makes the experience so memorable for each person who sees one.
I’ve spoken to many coronaphiles over the years, and the stories they tell of their first time seeing totality reveal the sense of awe that is found in the shadow of the Moon. Eclipse-chaser and expert photographer Geoff Sims saw his first total solar eclipse in 2002 in southern Australia. He had read all about eclipses: including what to expect and how to photograph them. He piled all of his equipment in a car that he drove for three days across the continent to reach a point near the center of totality. What he experienced there was more than he’d expected: “On face value,” he once told me, “it is everything that you read about, but the excitement during the lead up, the chills that you get when the Sun gets covered and you realize totality’s eminent, that kind of excitement I could never have imagined. Then when you see the corona, it just blew me away. Because you can’t describe exactly how that appears in the sky, and photos just don’t do it justice. You can never anticipate what it will really be like for the light to just disappear so quickly.” His photographic work on eclipses has now taken him all over the world, and it was thanks to his efforts in scouting locations on the Faroe Islands a year ago that I’ve been able to meet so many people here.
David Makepeace is a filmmaker from Toronto, Canada, who, like many of the growing number of eclipse-chasers worldwide, is in no way a scientist. His first total solar eclipse was in 1991 in Baja California, Mexico. A girlfriend invited him down to see the eclipse. “I had taken an astronomy course at the University of Toronto so I had some kind of basic understanding of what would happen,” he shared. “But I went there primarily to see her; the eclipse on the beach would be secondary. Then we saw it and it totally blew my socks off. I was silent for two days afterward, sitting on the beach staring off at the Sea of Cortez wondering about my existence, wondering what I was doing here on this big rock flying through space.” Today he works on films and planetarium programs to share this experience with the public.
I look up and see that my sky overhead is now a race between scattered clouds and the Moon. One minute it’s clear, the next it’s cloudy. Each time the Sun reappears, it is a little farther gone and the colors even stranger. The Sun is now so small that the shadows are sharper, cast by a single white spotlight.
Everything is happening so fast. The light fails, the temperature drops, and suddenly new clouds form over the mountains around us. Just thirty seconds before totality begins, clouds seal the sky shut, and then it goes black. Each one of us is no more than a silhouette under a sky now darker than any day I have ever experienced. The clock begins: two minutes is all we have.
All we need is a momentary break in the clouds anytime in the next two minutes, and we will easily see the corona with our now dark-adapted eyes. Even for a cloudy day, this darkness is unnatural. I can understand the fear of those early quarrelsome brothers in the ancient Norse story. It’s absolutely obvious that above these clouds something strange is happening.
We wait. We look all around at the unbroken blanket overhead. Just a single break is all we need. One minute gone. Sixty seconds left. Is it slightly clearer over there? No?
The horizon grows light, the Moon’s shadow is leaving . . . and then a second dawn breaks as the clouds everywhere grow bright and drift apart. Once more we are in Sun.
I missed it.
I fold up my tripod and put away my camera to occupy my thoughts for just a little while. We all joke that we’ll see each other next time in Indonesia, or the United States. It helps dampen the disappointment.
Later, at the dinner table of Lis and her husband, Andras, with their family gathered from across the islands, we tell stories of what we’d seen, and in time, we laugh. We talk about who was clouded out and who wasn’t. On the roof of the hotel the staff saw totality, while the tour group staying there, who had traveled to a special location for the event, did not. As we talk, we all agree that the sense of having shared in something awe-inspiring in the darkness truly made this day unique for everyone (even under the clouds).
Súsanna Sørensen of the Visit Faroe Islands tourist board told me later about her own experiences, after all the work of helping others to see the eclipse: “We had invited my family and my husband’s family to early breakfast at our house. It was a very special morning, with an exciting atmosphere prior to the eclipse. The weather was not too good and it was fantastic when we saw first contact; it was finally here and we could see at least parts of it. Breakfast had to wait and we all went out on our balcony. It was a very strange feeling when totality began, how the light disappeared, like turning off a switch. It was a really beautiful light with a yellow rim at the horizon.” Though, like my group, she was clouded out for totality itself, she was philosophical about it: “There was a small hole in the clouds where you could see the blue sky, and we knew that somebody else probably saw totality through that hole.”
For those who did, and even those who didn’t, we all saw and shared something that day, and we felt lucky to have experienced what we did. A month later I received an email from Sùsanna, who told me that, even now, “it has been the talk of every social gathering I have been to since, even this weekend, when we were out with friends. The dramatic light is something that everybody talks about and how it made us all feel small and at the same time part of something bigger.”
Like so many others who witnessed that eclipse, she is now thinking about where she can go next to see another. In some sense, the answer to that question is easy. Unlike many other natural spectacles, there is no question about exactly what date the next total solar eclipse will begin, or even the exact moment. All that is in doubt is if we will be there to see it, and who will be fortunate enough to be there with us to share the experience.
a In 2017, the residents of St. Louis and Kansas City, Missouri, will get the opportunity to see this same phenomenon in exactly the same way, as each city is split in half by the eclipse’s path.