I was in love with the night sky long before I took astronomy courses in college. As a child I routinely lost sleep staring up at the stars during summer stays on the shores of Lake Ontario. We could not afford a telescope then, but I have more than made up for it since; I have a 6-inch Dobsonian telescope through which I often gaze at the moons of Jupiter and, with the right lens and a full moon, I can feel like I’m about to land on the Sea of Tranquility. The telescope weighs about 25 pounds. The only thing that keeps me from buying an even more powerful, 8-inch telescope is that it would weigh a little over 50 pounds – too much for me to easily haul around in star-gazing quests.
Still, I’ve never seen a full solar eclipse. I have seen a partial eclipse, where the moon covering the sun makes our star look like a yellow cookie with a bite taken out. But I have always wanted to see the whole thing.
So for months I’ve been looking forward to The Great American Eclipse, which will take place April 8. On that day a total eclipse will cover a diagonal band stretching from Mexico to Maine.
Unfortunately, I keep hitting speed bumps on my quest for totality. That is the term for the 115-mile-wide area that will experience a minutes-long nightfall as the eclipse sweeps across 13 states.
Six months ago, I tried to arrange for hotel reservations in Vermont, enough ahead of time that I was confident of getting a room. Ha! I was months too late. I couldn’t find rooms anywhere in the Green Mountain State. And maybe I couldn’t have afforded a room anyway.
In my hometown of Buffalo, New York, smack in the middle of eclipse mania, one Westin Hotel is charging $715 a night the day before the big show. A room in a Sheraton Hotel in nearby Niagara Falls, New York, is going for $1,800 a night. So many people are expected to travel to Niagara Falls, Ontario, that the city has already declared a state of emergency.
Driving to Buffalo would be too time consuming for me, even though I’m certain I could find a couch on which to flop among friends and family. Vermont is closer, but since hotels filled up months ago, I went through my address book to find likely friends from whom I could beg an overnight stay. Taking pity on my abject groveling, my friends Michele and Bruce invited me to stay at their house in Barnard, Vermont. It’s south of the state’s capital of Montpelier by a little more than 40 miles. We’ll have an eclipse party. I’ll bring fresh bread. Dark glasses, too, so we can all ogle in safety.
I assumed, of course, that we would be so close to the band of totality – 40 miles! – that the town of Barnard would be plunged into darkness, like the more northern areas of the state. I mean, we are talking 98 or 99 percent of a total eclipse. Close enough, right? But assumptions are dangerous.
I emailed a professor in the Earth and Space Sciences department at Central Connecticut State University to ask her if my assumption was correct. She told me that the difference between being in the band of totality where the moon completely covers the sun and an eclipse of 98 percent “is literally the difference between night and day.” It turns out that even a 99 percent eclipse will just make the day get a little darker, while being in the zone of totality will provide not only darkness, but also the feeling of being on a different planet, one with a black star in the sky as the moon conceals the sun.
So I got out the map. A drive north of 40 miles the morning of the eclipse will get me in the zone, but a drive that would normally be 45 minutes may take hours. Vermont is expecting an influx of between 60,000 and 200,000 people, all of whom will have the same idea: north, to the eclipse! It could be worse; the Buffalo area, where my sister Claudia is heading to stay with relatives, is expecting an extra 1 million people.
So I’ll decide the day of the event. If I brave traffic and manage to get to the zone, I may end up staring upwards from some supermarket parking lot with 10,000 other tourists. Since I will be on the very edge of the eclipse zone, the entire event will only last around a minute. Only in the middle will people enjoy a more than three-minute show.
If it doesn’t work out, I may have another chance. The next total eclipse in the United States will be in August of 2044. Hey, I’ll only be a sweet, young thing of 86. And this time, I’ll have 20 years to make a hotel reservation.
Good luck!
I’ll be on a cruise ship out at sea.
Heading to Bermuda, so we won’t see much.