By a lucky coincidence, the and the sun appear to be almost the same size, each subtending about half a degree of arc in diameter. As a result, the endless and repetitive wobbly dance of the worlds causes the moon to pass directly in front of the sun every year or two, sometimes hiding it completely in a .
Typically, the people on some barely inhabited stretch of land or ocean a few hundred miles wide and a few thousand miles long are treated to a few minutes of noontime darkness. The sun is replaced by an inky hole in the sky surrounded by the feathery glow of the , a halo of superheated gas that surrounds it. The landscape turns caramel. Winds blow, the temperature falls apocalyptically, and wildlife go crazy.
Friday’s solar eclipse will be no different. The shadow of the moon will cross over the North Atlantic Ocean and into the Arctic. The only places on land where the eclipse will be total are the and , a Norwegian archipelago, at around 5:45 a.m. Eastern time. People and spooked animals in Europe, Russia and North Africa will see a partial eclipse.
Waiting for it in Svalbard, as he has for 58 eclipses of various kinds dating back to 1959, will be , an astronomer and director of at Williams College, and a team of colleagues supported in part by . Dr. Pasachoff is an expert on the corona, one of the sun’s most exotic but bashful features. Its pearly light is less than a millionth as bright as the sun itself and thus is visible only during those rare instances when the moon completely covers the sun.
He’s seen eclipses from ships and airplanes and camps on the ground on every continent including Antarctica, from to New England. In 2009, for this newspaper about an eclipse in China that was to be the longest of this decade.He has already laid plans for eclipses next year in Indonesia and 2017 in Oregon.
“We’re here for the science, yes,” Dr. Pasachoff wrote in 2010 from Easter Island. “But there’s also the primal thrill this astronomical light show always brings — the perfect alignment, in solemn darkness, of the celestial bodies that mean most to us.”
Dr. Pasachoff wrote recently from Oslo, where he and his wife, Naomi, were getting ready to go north to Svalbard, a former whaling base that is halfway between Norway and the North Pole. Thousands of tourists have gathered there ahead of the eclipse, including one man who was attacked by a polar bear inside his tent Thursday, according to . (The man fared better than the furry intruder, escaping with minor injuries while the bear was shot to death.)
“The weather forecasts for Svalbard mainly show “partly cloudy,” which is what we hoped for — since it is almost never COMPLETELY clear,” wrote Dr. Pasachoff wrote in an email. “So we are hopeful; the cloud statistics over 20 years from weather satellites show about a 1/3 chance of seeing totality.”