Less than 1500 km from home, and I didn’t go! I kicked myself mentally for days after that, knowing that I had missed one of the more spectacular astronomical events in my lifetime. I did watch the partial eclipse visible from my location near LAX with an improvised helioscope made from an old set of binoculars and a cardboard box. It was OK, but when I heard the reports coming in from friends who were in Cabo San Lucas at the tip of Baja, California, I kicked myself again.
From Fred Espenak (Mr. Eclipse):
The Experience of Totality is one never to be forgotten. In the last seconds as totality begins, the daytime sky is quickly replaced by an eerie twilight as the Moon’s shadow sweeps across the landscape at speeds in excess of 1,200 mph. The bright Sun is suddenly extinguished and in its place stands the pitch black disk of the Moon surrounded by the gossamer, ethereal solar corona. All too quickly, totality ends and you realize you must see another one!
The next opportunity for totality in North America will be in August of 2017, following a path from Oregon to South Carolina:
From Hermit Eclipse pages:
The total solar eclipse of August 21 2017 will be spectacularly visible across to millions of people across the United States. This will be an impressive total eclipse, lasting over 2½ minutes at maximum and visible over a path up to 115 km wide.
The path starts in the Pacific well north of Hawaii at 16:48:33 UT, and then crosses to make landfall in the U.S. in the northern half of Oregon. It then crosses Idaho, Wyoming, and Nebraska, and clips the north-east corner of Kansas before passing right over Missouri. It cuts over the southern tip of Illinois and the western end of Kentucky, then crosses Tennessee and the western tip of North Carolina; the extreme north-east corner of Georgia will also be in the path of totality.
Finally, the total eclipse crosses South Carolina and passes into the Atlantic, where it runs south-east into the tropics and finally ends over open ocean at 20:02:30 UT.
I plan to be somewhere along that line in just over 10 years from now.
Solar Eclipse Image credit & © Fred Espenak – click for larger view.