This will bring us right into the “path of totality”: the narrow band of total darkness cast by the moon’s shadow.Īs we approach our hotel, the rain comes down.
Navy’s ill-fated 1943 invasion of Japanese-occupied Tarawa-is to “get the hell in and get the hell out.” Early tomorrow we’ll board a ship and travel another eight hours to the even smaller Kiribatian island of Marakei. Our goal-much like that of Admiral Chester W. We won’t have the chance to see much else. But nobody who’s seen one ever forgets the experience.ĭriving into Bikenibeu, Tarawa’s largest town, we pass scraggly coconut palms, pigs lounging in leaf piles, and boys on a muddy soccer pitch. For some, it’s a scientific epiphany for others, a spiritual catharsis. The sun’s corona, which is the hottest thing visible to the naked eye, appears to explode outward, a nimbus of black silhouette. As the moon’s disc covers the sun, day morphs instantly into night. The passion is understandable witnessing a total solar eclipse is like being transported to another world. During the past 25 years, viewing eclipses has become an elite obsession-like collecting single-malt whiskeys, or seeing every Bruce Springsteen concert. Though astronomers have been predicting total solar eclipses for four millennia, the idea of chasing them didn’t take hold until early in the 18th century. The motive inspiring us to travel halfway around the world-from as far away as Iran, Germany, and Japan-is one of nature’s most fantastic light shows. Today we awakened at dawn and were herded onto a three-hour, 1,300-mile flight to this bona fide backwater: a lonely World War II battleground straddling the equator. Most of our group of 34, which includes some of the planet’s most fanatical eclipse chasers, arrived in Fiji only yesterday. I’m not about to jinx his eighth total solar eclipse with a foul-weather vibe. Charlie sees where this is going and stops me. I’m squinting nervously at the sky, which is filling with dark clouds. We’ve descended the gangway and are crossing the tarmac toward the small air terminal on the atoll of Tarawa, the capital of Kiribati, a tiny island nation in the South Pacific. “Don’t say it!” Charlie McCollister, a former General Hospital actor whom I vaguely recognize from an old Gillette commercial, pokes me in the ribs.