Eclipse Chasing

The pursuit of solar eclipses in order to observe them, practiced by travelers known as umbraphiles, or shadow lovers, who use eclipse glasses, solar viewers and telescopes to view the sun and are motivated by everything from scientific research to personal emotional experience; solar eclipses occur at least twice and as often as five times a year somewhere on Earth. Early eclipse chasers emerged in the nineteenth century, among them Amherst College astronomer David Peck Todd and his wife Mabel Loomis Todd, who traveled the world to see them, and the twentieth century brought increasingly ambitious airborne observation, including a sixteen-aircraft United States Navy expedition in 1923 and, in 1932, the first photograph of the Moon's shadow on the Earth during an eclipse, taken by Albert William Stevens, sometimes called the father of airborne astronomy, and Lieutenant Charles D. McAllister. The scale the hobby can reach today was shown by the 2024 eclipse across the United States, which drew an estimated four to five million travelers along its path of totality.