Eclipse chasers trek the globe for that mid-day darkening

WASHINGTON: While Monday’s total solar eclipse in the United States will be a once-ina-lifetime sky show for millions, there’s a small group of people who have experienced it all before and they can’t get enough of it.

Glenn Schneider has seen 33. Fred Espenak has watched 28. Donald Liebenberg has logged 26. For newbie Kate Russo, it’s 10 and counting.

These veteran eclipse chasers spend lots of money and craft intricate plans all to experience another mid-day darkening of the sky.

Many work in science and related fields and they’ll travel around the world, even to Antarctica, to see one more.

“I do this not so much as an avocation, but as an addiction,” said Schneider, a University of Arizona astronomer.

Russo, a psychologist in Ireland who wrote a book about people’s eclipse experiences, said some people find the experience life-changing. That happened to her.

“Eclipse chasing isn’t just a hobby or interest,” Russo wrote in an email from Wyoming, where she travelled to see Monday’s eclipse.

“Eclipse chasing is a way of life. It becomes who you are.”

Total solar eclipses happen on average every 18 months or so, but they usually aren’t near easy-to-drive highways.

Norma Liebenberg has been to a dozen, mostly joining her avid eclipse watcher husband, Donald, in remote places like Libya, Zambia and Western China.

“It’s sort of mind-boggling that there are 1,000 people out in these isolated places to see it,” she said.

“There’s a compulsiveness to eclipse chasers, especially photographers,” said Dr Gordon Telepun, an Alabama plastic surgeon who has seen only three.

“It’s very anxiety producing, it’s very challenging,” said Telepun, who even developed a talking phone app that times an eclipse so photographers don’t miss anything. “It’s an adrenaline rush man, I’m telling you.”

Telepun said his hero is “Mr Eclipse” Espenak, a retired Nasa astrophysicist, who explains why chasers are the way they are.

“It’s the closest any of us will come to being an astronaut and being in space,” Espenak said.

— AFP For an awesome view: A sign placed by the US Army Corps of Engineers urging people to view the solar eclipse from the Barkley Dam Powerplant in Kuttawa, Kentucky. The dam is located along the path of totality in Western Kentucky.