Partial Eclipse of the Heart
Reading Time: 4 minutesI Thought About Making Travel Plans for the Eclipse—Then I Had a Realization., I’m not traveling to see the totality. And you shouldn’t feel pressured to do so either!, April 8 eclipse: How to enjoy it if you’re not in the totality.
‘Seeing a partial eclipse,’ wrote Annie Dillard in a 1982 essay, ‘bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him.’ She recounts the strange spirituality of witnessing totality on a mountainside in central Washington.
It sounds amazing! And I get her metaphor—you can’t know how wonderful and strange some events in life are until you have experienced them. An astronomer made Dillard’s point in more scientific terms to a reporter at the Montreal Gazette: ‘A partial eclipse, when you’re just outside the path of totality—be it 99.9 percent—is not 99.9 percent of the experience of a total eclipse. You’re very far from it.’ The astronomer had personally traveled to see 10 solar eclipses across the world.
So, yes, in basic terms, I understand why people are going to great lengths to experience Monday’s solar eclipse. The editor of this piece, for example, is driving at least seven hours one way to northern New Hampshire to see it. In 2017 parenting and science writer Melinda Wenner Moyer wondered if hauling her family 2,880 miles across the country to witness the eclipse would be a mistake, before finding the experience ‘magically surreal—worth every mile.’
But let me make the case for the rest of us, the non–eclipse chasers, who are staying home. The entire U.S. will be experiencing a partial solar eclipse. Just watch that! It may not be as cool, but it will be cool too.
Here was my partial eclipse experience in 2017 in New York: I went on the roof of the apartment building in Chinatown where the Wirecutter, my employer at the time, had a test home and watched with my co-workers as a chunk of the sun got taken out by the moon. It was nice? I don’t think that it changed my life or anything—to go back to Dillard’s comparison—the way marriage has, but in terms of experiences I would like to repeat, it was a good one. A unique twist on a workday, for sure.
There are ways to maximize the enjoyment of a partial eclipse. Ann Finkbeiner, a writer who covers astronomy, among other things, chronicled her experience, during the ’90s, of viewing a partial eclipse from her home in Baltimore, and what happened after she turned her eyes not to the sky but to the ground. She describes the hundreds of tiny crescent ‘baby eclipses’ that formed in the shadows when vines and leaves acted like pinhole cameras. ‘I didn’t have to do a thing for it, God and physics just handed it to us,’ she writes, adding, ‘It wasn’t a big epiphany, more like goofy delight.’ That does sound delightful!
And one more layer. We have already established that a partial eclipse is not the same experience as a full one. But will the partial eclipse be a lesser experience? Only if you evaluate it in terms of a three-ish-minute span of time, the length of time the sun will be covered by the moon in the path of totality (though this amount is even less in some places that are still in the totality). What if you include all of the surrounding time, effort, money, and travel that it will take to get to having those three-ish minutes in that place? (As well as the possibility of scrambling to reorient your plans when cloud cover threatens to interfere with the experience.) The New York Times reported that one hotel in Illinois, a normally inexpensive Super 8, is charging nearly $1,000 for a one-night stay during the event. ‘Having a total solar eclipse pass through the U.S. is kind of like having 20 or 30 Super Bowls happening all at once,’ a member of the American Astronomical Society’s Solar Eclipse Task Force told Time magazine. The piece warns of traffic jams and advises eclipse chasers to extend their stays in towns, arriving early and leaving late. I am simply not a person who likes being in crowded areas! Life in New York provides quite enough opportunities for that.
I did not, completely, just lie down and accept the partial eclipse as my eclipse experience. I briefly considered flying to Texas and staying with a friend. (For some reason I now forget, this weekend wasn’t ideal.) I also thought about traveling to Montreal, a city I love dearly. (This time of year, though, can still fairly be considered winter: The city just experienced a snowstorm, and honestly, I don’t want to visit during that.) I guess what I am saying is that, in addition to not liking crowds, I prefer my travel be dictated by terms other than alignment of the moon and the sun.
A partial eclipse may not be the same as a full one, but that doesn’t mean it’s not still cool. To return, again, to Dillard’s metaphor: Marriage is great. But you know what’s also amazing? Kissing!
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2024/04/reasons-to-see-just-partial-eclipse.html
Ref: slate
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