Chasing Totality
A partial eclipse and a total eclipse are not the same thing
People say that and it sounds like snobbery until you have stood in the shadow. Ninety-nine percent is a strange afternoon. One hundred percent is something else entirely — the light drains out of the world, the temperature drops, birds go quiet, and a black hole opens up where the sun was.
Then it is over, and you start looking up the next one. That is the whole thing. We have been doing it since 2017.
Seventy seconds, start to finish
An hour of the moon quietly taking bites out of the sun, and then the part you actually came for — gone in a little over a minute.
First Contact
The moon takes its first bite.
Narrowing
Half an hour in, and the light starts to feel wrong.
Last Sliver
Seconds out. Glasses still on.
Diamond Ring
The last bead of sun, and the corona arrives.
Totality
Glasses off. This is the one.
No clouds to argue with
The advantage of watching from a ship is that the weather is negotiable. If the forecast turns, the captain moves. On land you pick a field months ahead and pray.
We sailed out of Southampton on the Disney Dream with Adam and Amanda and met the shadow well offshore. Clear sky, flat sea, and a sunset in every direction at once when the shadow came over.
“Ninety-nine percent is a strange afternoon. One hundred percent is a different planet.”
Everybody up top, everybody looking the same way
Whole decks of people in cardboard glasses, waiting on the same minute. There is a particular noise a crowd makes when the diamond ring goes — part cheer, part swearing, part nobody knowing what to do with themselves.
Glasses on, waiting it out.
The rail filled up long before first contact.
Mid-totality. That is the sun over her shoulder.
Adam and Amanda — the whole reason you bring friends along.
The two that got us here
Both shot on phones, by people who were meant to be looking up rather than fiddling with a camera. They are grainy and crooked and we are keeping them.
Cardboard glasses from the hardware store, a folding chair each, and a field full of strangers all facing the same way. We went down with the whole Cross family, none of us really knowing what we had signed up for, and spent the drive home planning the next one.
Glasses on, well before there was anything to see.
The light going, in the middle of the afternoon.
Camp chairs beside the truck, and a whole morning spent watching the forecast and the sky argue with each other. The cloud thinned out with about ten minutes to spare.
All four of us, before the light started to go.
Thin cloud hanging around right to the end.
Totality, straight off a phone. No filter, no tripod.
Three down
Our first total eclipse, and the one that started all of this. A roadside field, the whole Cross family, and no real idea what was coming.
21 August 2017The longest stretch of totality we have had, and very nearly lost to weather. The cloud thinned out with minutes to spare.
8 April 2024Sailed out of Southampton with Adam and Amanda and met the shadow on open water. Short, but clean — not a cloud in the way.
70 seconds of totalityThe long one. The shadow crosses southern Spain and North Africa, and near Luxor totality runs to six minutes and twenty-three seconds — more than five times what the Atlantic gave us. Nothing booked yet. Give it time.
2 August 2027