Meet the Eclipse Chasers Traveling Thousands of Miles for the Astronomical Event

Among ancient civilizations who regarded solar eclipses as an evil omen, the sight of the cosmic phenomenon would have been cause for despair. But for many enthusiasts traveling thousands of miles to see the upcoming solar eclipse on April 8, the opposite is true. “I’m not in any way religious at all. But [the eclipse is] almost as close to a religious moment as I think you can get,” says Sarah Marwick, a 51-year-old doctor based in the U.K. “It makes you feel enormous and tiny at the same time.” [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Marwick—who has seen six eclipses in the last 25 years in the Arctic Circle, China, France, Libya, the U.S., and Zimbabwe—is an eclipse chaser, or umbraphile. The neologism cannot be found in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, but the word, meaning shadow lover, is used to describe the people who flock across the globe for a chance to see the moon obscure the sun. Eclipses happen anywhere from four to seven times a year, according to NASA. But solar eclipses are a much rarer phenomenon to see than lunar eclipses because they are only visible from a small area of the Earth each time they occur.  “If it’s 10 seconds or several minutes, it doesn’t matter. It’s always too short for you,” says Tunç Tezel, a 46-year-old civil engineer from Turkey who has seen 13 solar eclipses and three lunar eclipses since 1999. He is traveling more than 6,000 miles from ...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized feature News Desk Solar Eclipse 2024 Source Type: news