Welcome to Ramin’s Space, the newsletter from science writer Ramin Skibba. You can read more about the newsletter here. If you like it, please consider subscribing and sharing this post.
Dear readers, I hope many of you were fortunate enough to have the chance to put yourself in the path of the moon’s shadow yesterday and that you were spared pesky cloud cover, too. If you’re excited to experience it again, or if you missed this cosmic opportunity and you’re having FOMO, here are a few upcoming total solar eclipses to watch out for over the next decade or so, if you’re able to travel.
August 12, 2026 in Iceland and Spain
August 2, 2027 in Morocco and Egypt
July 22, 2028 in Australia and New Zealand
November 25, 2030 in South Africa and Australia
March 30, 2033 in eastern Russia and northern Alaska
March 20, 2034 from Nigeria through Iran
September 2, 2035 in China, Korea and Japan
Let me try to describe my own experience of El Gran Eclipse Americano, where the lunar shadow first made landfall. Yesterday morning, we were incredibly grateful for mostly clear weather, with only thin, dappled clouds in the bright, blue sky. At first, we saw (through our eclipse glasses) the moon’s partial coverage, like Pacman, and then a shrinking crescent. My daughter said, “It looks like the sun is screaming.” A friend of mine coming from Seattle spotted seagulls, frigatebirds and pelicans flying about, apparently with nary a concern that the end of the world was approaching. Another friend, a physics professor coming from San Diego, showed us the eclipse patterns of shadows through tiny holes in a strap. (None of us packed a colander.) The sky began darkening substantially 10 minutes before totality, and automatic nighttime lights flicked on. Goosebumps sprang up on my arms, either from the cooling temperatures or my thrilled anticipation. The transformation quickened as the sun retained just a whisker of light. Everyone on the crowded Mazatlan beach—the first of millions of people to see the eclipse—began to cheer.
And then totality hit, the pinnacle of the celestial dance of our moon and sun. It was nothing like anything I’ve seen before. We took off our eclipse glasses and could look with our naked eyes. The black disk of the moon completely blotted out the sun, making the solar corona, or atmosphere visible. (Some of that corona was obscured by clouds though.) My son said it resembled a diamond ring—an apt description. The ring was studded with little beads and a glowing pink gem on the lower right, a solar flare. It was surreal, seeing a 360-degree sunset, a twilight just before noon. Mars and Venus suddenly were visible in the sky. I struggled to take photos, and mostly I tried to soak in everything during those fleeting four minutes. My neck cramped, as I’m not used to craning toward the sky so long, but it was worth it. During the whole time, everyone cheered and whooped with delight, dazzled by the rare display. For this moment, thousands of people, residents and tourists and nerds and Mexicans and Americans and Canadians, were connected, united by the experience.
It felt like it ended too soon. A sliver of sun returned, and all was bright again, and we returned our eclipse glasses to our eyes. The main act had ended, as the sun reasserted its dominance of the sky. I hope to see this again someday.
I’m still riding high after witnessing all that, along with the joy of reconnecting with old friends. Humans should enjoy these eclipses now, while the apparent angular size of the moon and the sun are coincidentally the same. Did you know the moon’s very gradually moving away from the Earth? It means that eventually, in a few hundred million years, it’ll be too small to block the entire sun, so there will be no more totality for anyone on Earth to see anymore.
In other writing…
I liked this unique NYT eclipse story, by Robyn Ross, about blind or visually impaired people using LightSound devices to experience the event, as it’s translated into the sounds of musical instruments. It’s a similar concept to the sonifications of NASA images I wrote about last year in WIRED.
Here are a few other interesting perspectives and takes on the eclipse, by Paola Rosa-Aquino in Defector, by Rivka Galchen in the New Yorker, and by Leo DeLuca in Scientific American. That last piece reminds me of an excellent feature by Josh Sokol in Science, about the Mayans’ understanding of astronomy. I was also glad to see journalists striking along the eclipse’s path, in Austin and Rochester.
I also recommend this ode to birding, by Ed Yong in the New York Times.
More about me: I’m a science writer and journalist based in the Bay Area. I was WIRED magazine’s space writer until December 2023, and before that I worked as a freelance writer and an astrophysicist. You can find me at my website, raminskibba.net, and on Twitter and Bluesky. I’m also former president of the San Diego Science Writers Association (SANDSWA) and on the board of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW), though the opinions I express are mine alone. If someone has forwarded this email to you, you’re welcome to subscribe too.
Great summary, Ramin! We're delighted you shared the solar eclipse with our Seattle family!