A total eclipse is more than a spectacle. So I’m on the road to see it — again

With the probable exception of glimpsing Earthrise out the window of Apollo 8, a total solar eclipse may be the best show in the universe accessible to human eyes. I didn’t quite understand this seven years ago when I drove 900 miles all night and into morning from L.A. to Idaho the last time a total eclipse visited North America. “I pray you will never see anything more awful in the sky.” In the sky was something that should not be there — Annie Dillard, on the 1979 eclipse When 38 years later I witnessed the next total solar eclipse viewable from the United States, I too was shaken, though in a very different way. Milton summed it up in “Samson Agonistes”: “Oh dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, / Irrecoverably dark, total Eclipse / Without all hope of day!” Christopher Columbus used his foreknowledge of a lunar eclipse to force the Arawak residents of present-day Jamaica to heel in fear in 1504. During a total eclipse, the sun’s blazing corona and “diamond ring” of light oozing outside the lunar disk just before and after totality are the main spectacle.