Observing a total solar eclipse may be life changing
He approaches the first stranger with an expectant smile and an urgent query: “Do you know about the solar eclipse?”
The man shakes his head, and Mike Kentrianakis is launched. He’s here at the Hayden Planetarium as an emissary of the American Astronomical Society, and his mission is to spread the word: On Aug. 21, the moon will pass between the sun and Earth, casting a shadow across a swath of the United States. The spectacle will be like nothing most people have ever seen.
Carmen Irizarry, a science teacher from Staten Island, walks over with her two young granddaughters. She’s been thinking about taking them to a spot on the path of totality — where the moon will completely block out the sun for a few mesmerizing minutes. “I entirely encourage it,” Kentrianakis tells her. “It’s a completely different phenomenon. It shouldn’t even be called an eclipse. It should be called something else.”
Kentrianakis would know. He has witnessed 20 solar eclipses in his 52 years, missing work, straining relationships and spending most of his life’s savings to chase the moon’s shadow across the globe. The pursuit has taken him to a mountaintop in Argentina, a jungle in Gabon, an ice field north of the Arctic Circle — exposing him to every type of eclipse there is to see, on every continent except Antarctica. Last year he watched one from an airplane 36,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean. The video of his rapturous reaction went viral, cementing his status as a “crazy eclipse guy,” as he jokingly calls himself. “Oh, my God,” Kentrianakis exclaims 21 times in the 3 1/2 minute clip. “Totality! Totality! Whooo, yeah!”
But it’s the Aug. 21 eclipse, the first in a century to cross the entire continental United States, that Kentrianakis has been looking forward to for a lifetime. As the moon races in its orbit around Earth, it will briefly pass between our planet and the sun, completely blocking out the sunlight for people standing in its 70-mile-wide shadow. Over the course of an hour and a half, that shadow will follow the moon’s path across the continent, beginning off the Oregon coast and sweeping down to South Carolina.
Finally, all of America will see what he has seen. Finally, “they’re going to understand.”
“If it strikes you hard enough,” Kentrianakis says, “you will never be the same.”