This article is part of a special report on the total solar eclipse that will be visible from parts of the U.S., Mexico and Canada on April 8, 2024.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!Unless you’ve been living in Earth’s core for the past few weeks, you’ve probably heard that there will be a total solar eclipse across a long swath of the U.S. on April 8, 2024.
Scientific American has been covering this fantastic event with a lot of articles about why this happens, where to watch, what you can expect to see, how you can participate in the science and how to watch safely.
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All of those articles are based on fact and science and observation, and they are a big help if you want to understand what’s going on in the skies over your head on the big day.
But what will you feel?
I know this isn’t the most scientific of questions—it stopped Spock cold when it was asked of him in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home—but while an eclipse is, at its most fundamental, a scientific event, we experience it as humans. We feel.
Stories abound of people seeing a total solar eclipse for the first time. They gasp; they laugh; they jump up and down; they stand rooted to the ground and gape upward in awe; they even weep and become choked up by the overwhelming emotions flowing through them.
I understood all that as I gathered with a group of friends on a ranch in Wyoming on August 21, 2017. Well, I understood it academically, but I hadn’t experienced it for myself. I had been an astronomer for many decades, yet I hadn’t ever witnessed a total eclipse for myself. I’ve lost count of how many partial eclipses I’ve seen—more than a dozen, certainly. But partiality is a very different beast than totality. The most apt comparison I’ve heard is that it’s like reading about kissing versus actually kissing someone. You just have to experience it firsthand (or lip).
And so, on that day, when the moon slid over the sun, I experienced my first celestial kiss. And I finally understood what the commotion was about.
Still, it’s hard to describe. Worse, perhaps, is that it’s not clear why we feel the things we do when totality begins. I have my suspicions, though.
For one, the partial phase takes a while to transpire. At first you won’t note any changes around you. The sky, the lighting and everything else will seem normal. It’s not until the sun is mostly obscured, maybe around 70 to 80 percent covered, that you’ll start to notice things getting darker. The color of the sky will change subtly, and even shadows will look different. The sun is not a one-dimensional point of light, like most other stars in Earth’s sky, but rather a spread-out two-dimensional disk. Light shining from all across the sun’s disk acts to soften the edges of shadows, making them a little fuzzy. As the moon covers the sun, however, the illumination sharpens, as do shadows. You may not be overtly cognizant of it, but all this does add to the overall eeriness of the proceedings.
And excitement will be building all the while. In the final minutes before totality, the gloaming deepens. Birds stop chirping, insects may start thrumming, and the temperature drops. It feels like twilight in the middle of the afternoon.
Then at last the moon slides over the last bit of the sun. The sky truly darkens, and suddenly the solar corona appears: our star’s ethereal outer atmosphere will glow with a pearly luminescence that is vivid and literally otherworldly. We cannot see it without the benefit of our moon. It’s the climax to the growing tension you’ve been experiencing—an emotional release after having all the excitement wound up more tightly. And it’s so overwhelmingly beautiful that it’s not a surprise at all that people react so strongly.
At least, that’s my hypothesis. It’s not based on actual science, just my experience from 2017. Evidence like this is whimsically called “anecdata”: it’s something that’s better than an anecdote but probably not solid enough to be published in a journal. Still, I’d bet money I’m at least partially—if not totally—right.
And this is why it’s so important for you to actually experience it.
A digression: In the 1990s I was getting ready to head down to Florida to watch the Space Shuttle Discovery loft a camera I had worked on into space to be installed on the Hubble Space Telescope. A friend of mine who had seen dozens of shuttle launches gave me a tip. “Don’t take pictures or video,” he told me. “Just watch. Experience it. If you’re fiddling with your equipment during the launch, that’s what you’ll remember, not the launch itself.”
Being the hardheaded fool I was, of course, I ignored his advice. I tried to get video of the launch, but the camera had difficulty focusing, and all I remember now is swearing at my camera. Adding to the insult, the video I have to commemorate the event is blurry and useless. By trying to record the event, I actually wound up missing it.
I took this lesson to heart in 2017 and didn’t take a single photograph of the eclipse. Why bother? Millions of others would, and almost all those snapshots would look just like mine. I did take some pictures leading up to totality; we used a colander as a pinhole camera to make images of the partial phase on the ground, for example. That was fun. But when the moment came, I just drank it in.
And it was one of the single most profound experiences of my life. It’s imprinted on my soul, along with memories of getting married and the birth of my daughter. It truly is that overwhelming.
My advice? Learn from my past foolishness and just be present for this celestial magnificence.
What will you feel if you do? You may be flooded with joy, wonder, awe, a numinous sense of majesty or any of a dozen other emotions. Your reaction is personal and deserves to be your own. This is what makes the eclipse such a special phenomenon to us. Don’t interfere with your interaction with it! Let it happen and you’ll experience a profundity that will stay with you far longer than any memory reflected in a photograph.
Be there. You won’t regret it.
