Joss Fong | Vox

Why a total solar eclipse is a life-changing event, according to 8 eclipse chasers

2024-04-04T15:44:39-04:00

There’s a total solar eclipse somewhere on Earth once every 18 months or so. And whether it’s passing over a barren, ice-cragged coast of Antarctica, a remote African desert, or a lonely patch of ocean, you can be sure there will be an umbraphile — a shadow-loving eclipse chaser — there to see it.

Eclipse chasers are people who plan their lives around (and spend small fortunes on) eclipse travel. This year, of course, they’ll be joining millions of people in the United States to see the total solar eclipse on April 8.

The big questions about solar eclipses

Before the last US eclipse in 2017, we wanted to know: What’s so special about total solar eclipses that you would chase them around the world? So we called up eight eclipse chasers and talked to them for hours, asking them all a similar set of questions. Their responses were much more moving and poetic than we anticipated. Chasing eclipses is not about a cheap thrill. It’s more like a pilgrimage, but one with a constantly moving shrine. “There are insufficient superlatives in the English language, or any language for that matter, to adequately describe the experience of a total solar eclipse,” one told us.

Let’s try.

These conversations took place in 2017, and they have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How many total solar eclipses have you seen?

Rhonda Coleman, eclipse-chasing resident of Bend, Oregon

Six. … I’m a very modest chaser. Some people have [seen] dozens.

Glenn Schneider, astronomer at the University of Arizona

Thirty-three.

Bill Kramer, a retired computer engineer who runs the website Eclipse-chaser.com

Sixteen total solar eclipses.

Fred Espenak, a retired NASA astrophysicist who has predicted the next 1,000 years of eclipses

I’ve been to 27 total eclipses and I’ve seen about 20 of them. Seven clouded out.

David Makepeace, eclipse chaser and filmmaker

This one in America will be my 16th.

Joe Rao, meteorologist in New York

I’ve seen a grand total of 11 total eclipses.

Kate Russo, clinical psychologist and author of Being in the Shadow: Stories of first-time eclipse experience

I’ve seen 10 total solar eclipses, and of those, two were clouded out.

Mike Kentrianakis, astronomer with the American Astronomical Society’s solar eclipse task force

I have seen 10 total solar eclipses.

Tell us about your first time

Joe Rao

They say you never forget your first kiss, you never forget making love for the first time, and as far as an eclipse chaser goes, you always remember your first time in the shadow.

David Makepeace

I flew to Mexico to see a girl. I didn’t go to see an eclipse. And then the eclipse came, and it completely floored me.

I was completely unprepared for the vision I saw in the sky, and for how intense the feeling was of all of a sudden being lifted in my consciousness off the globe, off this two-dimensional life I was living. It opened up a three-dimensionality that I was not prepared for. … In some sense, I’ve spent the past 26 years also trying to come to terms with that.

Bill Kramer

We were bobbing in the water, clear sky all around us; the sea was relatively calm. This eclipse darkness wall came flashing across the water — and covered us in darkness. And there was this eclipse. “This is like looking upon the eye of God.” That’s the nearest thing I could equate it to.

Glenn Schneider

I was literally transfixed, I couldn’t move. I couldn’t operate my cameras. I didn’t even think about the telescope. My binoculars hung around my neck and I just stood there staring up at the hole in the sky. … When it was over, I just stood there unable to move until somebody finally shook me back into reality.

Fred Espenak

By the time the total eclipse ended … I had already promised myself that once in a lifetime was not enough. It was just spectacular and much too short. I’ve been to the majority of them since then over the past 47 years.

Kate Russo

I had no idea that it was going to be so powerful and emotive and euphoric and exciting. … It’s very unlike any other experience. This is why us eclipse chasers are so passionate. We so want to share this experience with other people.

What does it feel like to experience a total solar eclipse? Why are you hooked?

Bill Kramer

There are insufficient superlatives in the English language — or any language, for that matter — to adequately describe the experience of a total solar eclipse.

I always tell people my fifth eclipse is when my hands stopped shaking during totality. I made a comment of that, and a guy who’s seen more eclipses than I came back and said, “Really? Your hands stopped shaking?”

Kate Russo

When I talk about seeing a total solar eclipse, nobody gets it. Nobody can actually understand what it’s like in that situation because it’s just not within our human experience. The rules of nature are turned upside down, so we just cannot imagine it.

Joe Rao

How much alien stimulation can the mind process in just a little over two minutes? If I told you that I was in a major thunderstorm, or I saw a gorgeous sunset, you can relate to that. Because I’m sure you have experienced a big thunderstorm in your life, and I’m sure you’ve seen more than your share of beautiful sunsets. When I tell people about my first total eclipse, or any total eclipse, it’s impossible to relate that.

Rhonda Coleman

It’s very … it almost is like a bit of a dreadful feeling. It’s like, “Whoa, wait a minute. What’s happening to my planet?” … It’s a topsy-turvy world. It’s not like night. It’s not like day. It’s not like twilight. It’s like nothing you’ve ever felt before.

Fred Espenak

You experience the music of the spheres, as Kepler called them, the mechanics of the solar system in action.

You get an overwhelming sense of humbleness and how small and petty we really are compared to the mechanics of the solar system, the clockwork of the universe. These events that are taking place, that in no way can we affect or stop. It gives us a sense of how tiny we are and yet how we’re connected to the whole system. All this happens all at once.

David Makepeace

I saw the total eclipse and I realized that I was living in a much deeper, much more dynamic universe than I had previously considered.

Mike Kentrianakis

This is the grandest of all astronomical spectacles. It’s actually the greatest natural wonder that you could possibly see. Except, of course, the birth of a child.

How do other people typically react to totality, when the sun is completely covered by the moon?

Fred Espenak

Daylight suddenly changes to an eerie twilight in just a handful of seconds, and that’s dramatic enough. Then it tends to get quiet. The bright sun that was there just moments ago has vanished. It’s replaced by this black orb of the moon.

You hear some people saying: “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” and they just say it for three minutes. Others are totally speechless. Some people might even be praying. Others, just tears of joy running down their cheek.

Kate Russo

Even really hard-nosed scientists can get very, very moved during totality, and it’s not uncommon to see people afterward with tears and hugging and feeling very choked up.

What’s the farthest you’ve gone to see one? Or the most difficult journey?

Joe Rao

You do crazy things to see a total eclipse of the sun. In 1990, for example, I managed to get a commercial airline to change the itinerary of their flight. I noticed that there was one particular flight from Honolulu to San Francisco where if they were to delay the flight by 41 minutes, they would be over the Pacific Ocean, and they’d be able to see a total eclipse of the sun. I contacted the airline … they thought it was a heck of a great idea, and they did it.

David Makepeace

The most extreme eclipse chase that I’ve ever been on I saw from the coast of the far side of Antarctica. This huge, gorgeous Russian icebreaker ship that took more than 100 eclipse chasers from the tip of Africa down through the Indian Ocean to the Antarctic coast. Then we positioned ourselves precisely in the path of totality and were able to witness humanity’s first glimpse of a total eclipse of the sun from the ice continent.

Glenn Schneider

The first eclipse I saw by air, which was in 1986, was one of the most difficult eclipses to get to. Only nine people on earth actually saw that eclipse as a central total eclipse. The width of the path was less than a kilometer. We had to fly about 1,000 kilometers out of Reykjavik, Iceland, between Iceland and Greenland to see that. That was before the days of GPS navigation. It was a rather, rather dicey thing to do.

Is a partial solar eclipse just as good?

Fred Espenak

The difference between a 99 percent eclipse and a 100 percent total eclipse is enormous. I like to use the analogy [that] it’s like getting five out of six numbers right on the jackpot. If you got five out of six, you were close, but you lost. … Only 100 percent counts.

Kate Russo

When you come across someone who says that they thought it was overrated, if you ask a bit about where they were, it turns out that they didn’t see a total eclipse. They saw a partial eclipse, but they’re convinced it was a total.

Is it an “addiction”?

Joe Rao

I tell people, total eclipses of the sun are like potato chips. When you see it for the first time, the first thing that comes out of your mouth after the eclipse is over is, “When’s the next one?” And you become hooked.

Glenn Schneider

It almost becomes like there is not a choice. You plan your future travels and life years and years ahead. It’s not like there’s any question where you’re going to be taking your vacation 12 years from now. You’ve already got it figured out.

David Makepeace

The corona looks different every single time. You don’t know how many Baily’s beads or what kind of prominences you’ll see shooting off the surface of the sun. It is an experience of the most grand and exalted nature, so why would you not want to immerse yourself in that as much as possible?

Does eclipse chasing come with a cost, personal or otherwise?

Rhonda Coleman

Financial, I’ll give you that.

David Makepeace

God, I probably spent over $100,000 doing the travel in the past two and a half decades. You could say that I’ve been so caught up in the learning and in the growth personally that’s come from this that I’ve put off marriage and a family. I’ve sort of resisted the accumulation of material possessions so that I have the funds to be able to afford this kind of travel.

Are eclipses a form of psychological balm?

Kate Russo

It’s like something that is a reminder of how wonderful life is. It gives you life insights that you normally get only at times when you’ve experienced loss.

How many more eclipses do you hope to see?

Rhonda Coleman

I figure if I live to be 87 and beyond, which I’m doing pretty well so far, my last one will be, again in the United States, when I’m 87. I think it’s going to be in North Dakota or something like that. I think I can get there. I’m 58.

Glenn Schneider

I’ve already told my daughter where she needs to go to watch the 2079 eclipse on May 1, 2079. I don’t expect to make it, but I hope she can.

Fred Espenak

I certainly hope to see another dozen or more eclipses.

Mike Kentrianakis

Our life is now measured by a greater cycle. It’s no longer a second and a minute hand, and an hour, a day. But if you start using eclipse cycles, how many do you have? Not that many.

Should first-timers try to take pictures?

Rhonda Coleman

Anytime you’ve ever taken a picture of the full moon, it never captures how it felt in your eyes and in your heart, you know what I mean? It seems to fill the sky, but your photograph will only be a memory.

Mike Kentrianakis

The photograph just doesn’t do it justice. It’s almost like looking at a shadow of a building and not looking at the building. It’s a representation of what you would know it to be … a sketch of a missing person.

Joe Rao

Don’t try to photograph it. Please don’t.

Trying to photograph your first total eclipse of the sun is like … your first girlfriend or boyfriend. You’re not very good, it’s over very quickly, and you just want to do it again.

Fred Espenak

I recommend not trying to photograph it unless you are really a hardcore, absolutely-have-to-photograph-everything-in-your-life kind of person. … You don’t want to be dealing with technology during the eclipse.

David Makepeace

Totality … I absolutely guarantee it will seem like eight seconds.

Bill Kramer

Whatever you do, don’t use a flash. Because it’s dark and you’ve got people that are looking at the eclipse. Are you going to flash blind them?

Should everyone try to see a total solar eclipse?

Joe Rao

It should be on everybody’s bucket list, and if you don’t have a total eclipse of the sun on your bucket list, I personally will take a giant pencil with an eraser and erase something from off that bucket list and add total eclipse of the sun, because everybody, as they say, has to see it.

Update, April 2, 10:18 am ET: This story was originally published on August 10, 2017, and has been updated to include more information about the 2024 solar eclipse on April 8.

AI can do your homework. Now what?

2023-12-12T16:30:17-05:00

There’s no getting around the fact that students are a major user group for ChatGPT and the other AI language models that have come online in the past year. While schools and teachers would generally prefer to avoid the contortions involved in banning and policing AI use, it’s not clear what “embracing” the technology leads to, either.

In this video, we hear from students and educators about the challenges that AI chatbots pose to schoolwork. We also review research in the science of learning to understand how the “fluency” of a chatbot experience could disrupt the learning process that we go to school for.

You can find the video above and the entire library of Vox’s videos on YouTube.

The tricky plan for “negative emissions”

2023-04-06T13:58:27-04:00

In recent years, over 70 countries have committed to net-zero carbon emissions, aiming to become carbon neutral by mid-century. The 2015 Paris Agreement aimed to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius and ideally limit it to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Despite global efforts, emissions are still rising, and achieving the 1.5-degree goal has become increasingly difficult.

Most pathways to keep warming below 2 degrees and eventually return back to 1.5 rely on negative emissions, which involve pulling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere using carbon dioxide removal (CDR) methods like enhanced weathering and direct air capture.

However, these techniques are still in early development stages, and they require land, energy, and money. Critics argue that relying on CDR implicitly encourages governments and companies to postpone necessary emissions reductions because counting on CDR now means relying on future generations of leaders to deliver on those promises. Preventing emissions is broadly less costly than cleaning them up after the fact. But even with dramatic cuts to emissions, experts say some amount of CDR will still be necessary.

You can find this video and the entire library of Vox’s videos on YouTube.

A fact-checked debate about legal weed

2022-12-15T09:52:43-05:00

There are few places in the world where you can walk into a licensed shop and buy marijuana for recreational use. Uruguay is one. Canada is another. They’re joined by 21 US states, representing 48 percent of the American population, up from zero states in 2013.

That means that in Idaho, people caught growing or selling weed face mandatory jail time and tens of thousands of dollars in fines while their counterparts next door in Washington can enroll in a state-funded mentorship program for cannabis business planning and development. And states like Washington are violating both US federal law, which prohibits any use of marijuana, and also international law, which prohibits non-medical uses.

That’s messy. But it reflects that although large majorities agree that the criminalization of cannabis use was a mistake, there’s less consensus about how exactly to move forward.

Will Jones III, the director of community engagement and outreach at Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM), maintains that the commercialization of weed would lead to more harm than good. He prefers decriminalization, which removes criminal penalties, treating marijuana possession more like a traffic ticket. (Six US states have decriminalized recreational cannabis without legalizing it.) However, SAM prioritizes fighting legalization and reducing drug use over promoting decriminalization.

SAM co-drafted the Medical Marijuana and Cannabidiol Research Expansion Act, which makes it easier to study marijuana and develop marijuana-derived drugs but without descheduling marijuana as a schedule I illicit substance. President Biden signed it into law in December.

Paul Armentano, the deputy director of NORML (the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws), has spent decades advocating for the legalization of marijuana and says decriminalization doesn’t go far enough. NORML represents the interests of cannabis consumers and has been advocating for the removal of criminal penalties for recreational marijuana since 1970.

We thought both of their perspectives were worth hearing but didn’t want to stage a traditional debate where viewers so often come away confused about what to believe. So we created a format that would help establish a shared foundation of facts while still communicating what each of these advocates believes is the most important information to know.

In this new take on a debate, we asked both participants to identify facts that their opponent would have to concede are true. They were given an opportunity to review their adversary’s facts in advance and in a video call agreed on a set of six. In the video, you’ll see those facts presented, with each participant given the opportunity to add a “footnote” to their opponent’s facts.

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube.

Who’s really using up the water in the American West?

2022-09-27T12:50:12-04:00

The Western United States is currently battling the most severe drought in thousands of years. A mix of bad water management policies and manmade climate change has created a situation where water supplies in Western reservoirs are so low, states are being forced to cut their water use.

It’s not hard to find media coverage that focuses on the excesses of residential water use: long showers, swimming pools, lawn watering, at-home car washes. Or in the business sector, like irrigating golf courses or pumping water into hotel fountains in Las Vegas.

But when a team of researchers looked at water use in the West, they uncovered a very different story about where most Western water goes. Only 14 percent of all water consumption in the Western US goes to residential, commercial, and industrial water use. So who’s really using up the water? Their findings may hold the solution to dwindling water supplies in the West.

You can find this video and more on Vox’s YouTube Channel.

The fall (and rise?) of unions in the US

2022-08-09T17:22:37-04:00

“How come we’ve seen such a decline in unionization in the US?”

That’s the question we received from one of our viewers, Cameron, when we put out a call for topics to explain. It comes at an interesting time.

Earlier this year, the Amazon Labor Union won its first election at a large warehouse in New York and more than 200 Starbucks locations have voted to unionize since baristas in Buffalo broke the seal in December 2021. The National Labor Relations Board reports that petitions for union elections are up 56 percent this year, compared to 2021.

This level of energy and momentum in the labor movement is remarkable in light of the long, steep decline in union membership rates since the 1950s. Social science has limited tools for establishing what caused that decline, and different experts tend to emphasize different factors. But in the video above, we dig into a few key drivers of low union density in the US relative to other wealthy countries.

If you’re like Cameron and you have a big question about what’s happening in the world today, we’d like to help find your answer! Fill out our form and your question could be answered next: https://forms.gle/Mgp2oqa3gr8tNw1M7

Please note that for this format, we’re only accepting video questions via the form above.

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube.

The text-to-image revolution, explained

2022-06-01T15:59:49-04:00

Beginning in January 2021, advances in AI research have produced a plethora of deep-learning models capable of generating original images from simple text prompts, effectively extending the human imagination. Researchers at OpenAI, Google, Facebook, and others have developed text-to-image tools that they have not yet released to the public, and similar models have proliferated online in the open source arena and at smaller companies like Midjourney.

These tools represent a massive cultural shift because they remove the requirement for technical labor from the process of image-making. Instead, they select for creative ideation, skillful use of language, and curatorial taste. The ultimate consequences are difficult to predict but — like the invention of the camera, and the digital camera after it — these algorithms herald a new, democratized form of expression that will commence another explosion in the volume of imagery produced by humans. But, like other automated systems trained on historical data and internet images, they also come with risks that have not been resolved.

The video above is a primer on how we got here, how this technology works, and some of the implications. And for an extended discussion about what this means for human artists, designers, and illustrators, check out this bonus video:

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on our YouTube channel.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, explained in 8 moments

2022-03-09T14:28:10-05:00

Once known for his political comedy sketches and skits in which he pretended to play the piano with his penis, Volodymyr Zelenskyy was elected as the president of Ukraine in 2019 in a landslide victory.

Although he promised that his presidency would be different from other Ukrainian leaders who “promise a lot” yet “do nothing,” President Zelenskyy would soon find himself unpopular with the public. Within two years, he had already navigated scandals like his offshore companies appearing in the Pandora Papers and struggled to fulfill his campaign pledge to end the war against Russia in the Donbas region of Ukraine.

But the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, found him extremely well positioned to offer his skills in performance and storytelling to motivate Ukrainians, rally Europe, and undermine Putin’s propaganda. How will his reaction to Russia’s advances affect his legacy?

We chose eight clips that we feel explain President Zelenskyy’s rise from a comedian to the leader of Ukraine and had journalists and experts respond.

How American conservatives turned against the vaccine

2022-02-23T15:04:37-05:00

President Donald Trump presided over the fastest vaccine development process in history, leading to abundant, free vaccines in the US by the spring of 2021. Although the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines haven’t been able to stop transmission of the virus, they have been highly effective against hospitalization and death, saving hundreds of thousands of lives and rendering the majority of new Covid-19 deaths preventable.

Trump has received three doses of the vaccine. But many of his most dedicated supporters have refused, and many have died as a result. Why? Obvious culprits include misinformation on social media and Fox News and the election of Joe Biden, which placed a Democrat at the top of the US government throughout the vaccine distribution period. But if you look closely at the data, you’ll see that vaccine-hesitant conservatives largely made up their mind well before the vaccines were available and before Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.

To understand why, I took a deep dive into the data, interviewed researchers, and spoke to people who lost loved ones to preventable severe Covid-19 infections. What I found is a stark cautionary tale for the country and for Republican political elites. Partisan polarization takes on a life of its own; once set into motion it’s nearly impossible to stop, even when the fallout is immense and irreparable.

Accepting donations in memory of Philly Baird and Phil Valentine.

Why the new space telescope looks so strange

2021-12-25T07:23:35-05:00

After 25 years and nearly $10 billion, the James Webb Space Telescope has finally left planet Earth. Billed as a successor to the beloved Hubble Space Telescope, the Webb’s mirror is six times larger and its instruments are tuned to observe longer wavelengths, in order to detect the stretched-out light from primitive galaxies 13.5 billion light years away.

That primary mission — to see the first stars and galaxies that formed after the Big Bang — determined the unusual and challenging design of the telescope. Instead of a shiny tube, the Webb Telescope looks like a giant honeycomb riding on a silver surfboard. The short answer to why it looks like that is: It needs to be very big and very cold.

In the video above, NASA astrophysicist Amber Straughn and I build a small model of the telescope to explore its extraordinary design.

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube.