Total eclipse of the heart
Highly scientifically accurate artist's conception
At Dragon Con this year, I mostly hit the TV show panels, but I did catch a few real astronomy panels. One by amateur astronomers who'd successfully photographed comets or asteroids or large meteorites hitting Jupiter, and another about solar eclipses. The solar eclipse one (actually I went because a Kepler telescope panel was scheduled, but I guess it got canceled, so I stayed for the solar eclipse one) was by two women who were amateur astronomers (or indeed, they may have been professional astronomers as well), but between them, they had been to 3 or more solar eclipses, one in Mexico in the 1990s (Probably July 11, 1991), one in China in the Himalayas that unfortunately got rained out (This might have been the July 22nd 2009 one), and one last July on Easter Island.
What I thought was interesting was, they described a subculture, even among the tourists who traveled to another continent to see a solar eclipse, of, effectively, eclipse enthusiasts who were something like Grateful Deadheads. For example, one person had been to 17 or so Solar Eclipses all around the world. Among this crowd, they would compare totality times (i.e., if you had 3 minutes and 15 seconds of totality at this eclipse, and a minute and 30 seconds at that eclipse, your total totality time would be 4 minutes 45 seconds --- sort of bragging rights among eclipsees). And of course, there'd be the heartbreak of traveling to some remote spot halfway around the world only to have thunderstorms that day, or whatever. Apparently a total eclipse is something of an eerie experience; animals, even birds and insects, get quiet, and some people have extreme reactions - laughing, bursting into tears. There seems to be a sense of this is weird.
The Easter Island one was also visible in Chile and Argentina, and I suppose they had eclipse tourists as well, but the pull to see it on Easter Island had to be almost magnetic (or perhaps tidal). I mean, Easter Island is such a pinprick in the ocean, the navel of the world, as its called (Google Earth: 27.117°S 109.367°W). A friend of mine went on a ham radio expedition (DXpedition, as they're called) to Easter Island in 1995, basically they go out to some remote island and ham radio for a few weeks.
I mistakenly consider myself something of an expert on Easter Island, since I've watched about a zillion documentaries about it on PBS/The Discovery Channel/The Learning Channel/The History Channel/The Easter Island Channel. It's amazing that anybody ever made it there in the first place in outrigger canoes, and it's a somewhat tragic story how the Big Stone Head society effectively made them all castaways, since after the trees were all cut down to move the heads around, there weren't any trees to make more outrigger canoes. Then, later, Europeans found it, then more ships, then, slavery, smallpox, the works.
Even among this scientific crowd, I suspect there's a sort of unspoken superstitious appeal of seeing an eclipse in the shadow (or lack thereof) of those Big Stone Heads. Why exactly this is, is kind of hard to define --- except that, if those Big Heads are ever going to come to life, ala NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM, it's probably during a solar eclipse. Similar to the way a friend of mine's picture of the Hale-Bopp comet over Stonehenge is cooler than a run-of-the-mill picture of the Hale-Bopp comet (Actually the same friend who did the Easter Island ham radio expedition). The last time a solar eclipse was visible from Easter Island was 656 A.D. (when the island was probably uninhabited), and the next time will be 2324.
Of course, the best time to see a solar eclipse, innumerable bad fictions have shown, is right before you're about to be plunked into the cooking pot by cannibals, so that you can threaten to make the sun go out.
wikipedia
Anyway, these women who went to the Easter Island eclipse were mentioning, the only power on the island comes from two generators left over from when NASA built an emergency runway for the shuttle in the 1980s or so. The question was, how many tourists would flock to this tiny island for the eclipse? The island ramped up and thought they could handle maximum of 10,000 tourists if it came to that, but in the end, about 3000 came. Apparently most of the eclipse-watchers clustered around 3 main groups of moai (the stone heads) on the island, because, as mentioned, if you're going to photograph an eclipse, it's much more dramatic to see it with 5 or 6 big stone heads.
I think I would have been tempted to strike off on my own for some of the more remote moai, but I picture myself, moments before the eclipse, scurrying around like something out of a Benny Hill sketch, only to find a dozen people at each head. Finally settling for some lesser, face-down-in-the-dirt moai ("Hey, Moai, you're missing a great eclipse!" "Hey Dum-Dum, give me Gum-Gum!")
I remember a partial solar eclipse in the 1980s (1984, possibly) when I was in Athens, Georgia. It got dim enough that you could tell the light was weird, and they had some telescopes set out in reverse, not to look through of course (eye damage!), but to project the sun and the chunk the Moon was taking out of it onto a piece of paper. I also remember watching a televised solar eclipse that took place in Seattle (apparently 1979, though I would have placed this later).
I was trying to think of other astronomical events that'd be worth traveling halfway around the world to see. Besides, obviously, the stars of the Southern hemisphere, which we don't see here in North America (although there's a week-long astronomy party on a Florida Key every year in late February or early March when such Southern Hemisphere stars as Alpha Centauri are visible).
What I'm thinking of though is in 2029 when the asteroid Apophis is going to come within spittin' distance (actually, within geosynchronous satellite range, under 23,000 miles, less than a tenth of the distance from the Earth to the Moon). Apparently it should be theoretically visible to the naked eye in Europe then. I'd be tempted to go over to see it, but I'd be pretty bummed out if it was cloudy.
But on Monday, August 21st, 2017, there will be a total solar eclipse that cuts a swath diagonally across the United States, and it'll be visible in northeast Georgia. If people can travel halfway around the world to see one, I'm certainly going to drive an hour and a half to see this one.
wikipedia.
Here's a webpage devoted to the 2017 eclipse: www.eclipse2017.org, and here's a Google Map showing the path of totality.