From the Archives - So We Missed the Eclipse

Introduction

I initially drafted this post back when my older daughter, A—, was home for Thanksgiving the year she moved away for college (but before COVID-19 brought her temporarily home again). I took advantage of her being around to query her on something close to my heart: what I should blog about next. (For me, coming up with a topic is, hands-down, the hardest part of being a blogger.) So long as she responded, this would be a can’t-lose situation: I might get a useable topic, and either way we’d have a meaty conversation.

In this case, I got both! Her topic? How our family missed out on doing anything fun around the total solar eclipse back in August of 2017. “I have a lot to say on that,” my daughter declared. So I grabbed my laptop to take notes, and we had a nice dialogue, which became a blog post. But for some reason, I never posted it. Now, with another eclipse have recently transpired, I’ve decided to remedy that.

Why would you read this? Maybe you are a father, or are going to be. Maybe you’re a daughter or son, or used to be. Or, maybe you care about astronomy, eclipses, or just science in general. Or perhaps you just hope I can make you laugh. As always, I’ll do my best.

By the way, this is the one photo I snapped from last Monday’s eclipse:

So we missed the eclipse – Nov 13, 2019

We didn’t entirely miss the eclipse but we sure didn’t get the most out of it. As I described in these pages at the time, I was totally disorganized and hadn’t thought up any great way to see it. My wife and I were vaguely aware that people were traveling to rural Oregon to experience the full effect, but we weren’t too keen on braving any crowds.

(By the way, here is the photo that pops up when you do a Google Maps search on Culver City. The 2017 eclipse has evidently put the place on the map.)

After the eclipse was over, that evening, my wife and I noticed that A— seemed glum. We tried to draw her out, to figure out the problem. College prep worries? A falling out with a friend? Finally I said, half-jokingly, “Is it the eclipse?” My daughter almost smiled. “It is, actually,” she said, a bit sheepishly. She was touring the Internet reading about the eclipse and came across Randall Munroe’s xkcd cartoon about it. If you hover your mouse over the cartoon you get an extra caption: “It was—without exaggeration—the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.” Munroe is to my daughter what Justin Bieber is to most teenage girls, so this was a profound statement. It was dawning on my daughter just how much she’d missed out on by having a deadbeat, incurious, non-science-y dad. Little did I realize my daughter would bring this up, two years later, in one of our first real conversations since she went off to college.

DA. Okay, so yeah… we missed the eclipse. We could have traveled to see it but we didn’t. In my defense, you had not indicated any particular interest.

AA. I just thought that was one of those things you’d figure out. My friends’ parents booked hotels in advance and I expected you had a plan. I figured that as the offspring of a rocket scientist you would be interested in it the same way I was. You’d seen stuff like that as a kid … your dad had done so much when the eclipse came through your town.

[My late father was literally a rocket scientist.]

DA. At what point did it dawn on you I wasn’t stepping up?

AA. Well, when my friends were talking about their plans I started to realize we probably weren’t doing anything. But I wasn’t too disappointed because I thought it would probably be one of those lame things like “Oh, your shadow’s a different color,” where you have to try to feel impressed by it. Or maybe I was being all skeptical just so I would be disappointed.

DA. So it never occurred to you to speak up and let me know you had interest.

AA. I think I mentioned it in passing. But I wanted to seem chill, like I didn’t really care, you know. It wouldn’t be very “cool teen” of me to say, “Hey, we should build a vacation around this!”

DA: But you’re bringing it up now, so clearly you’re a little bitter.

AA: Yes, I’m bitter.

DA: So does this reflect on my parenting?

AA: More than anything else you’ve ever done in your life. This is what will come out on the therapist’s couch in twenty years. It’s what led me down the road to academic ruin.

(This “academic ruin” comment is my daughter having a bit of fun. Decades ago, my brothers and I were in our dad’s car, along with his second wife, and as we passed by Bear Creek Elementary School our dad said to her, “There’s the school that led my boys down the road to academic ruin.” This comment produced only awkward silence at the time, but ever since my brothers and I trot it out routinely, along with other famous Dad-isms like, “You’re not very bright, are you.” After our Thanksgiving dinner the other night, I took a walk with my wife and daughters, and as we passed by their old elementary school, I said to my wife, “There’s the school that led our kids down the road to academic”—here I paused for effect and to feel my daughters’ glare, and then continued—“glory.”)

DA: How much of this eclipse remorse is just envy of your friends, a FOMO thing?

AA: It’s one of those bucket list things, a cultural phenomenon, like this mass pilgrimage to the Pacific Northwest where everyone can all be there for the same reason … but we just sat at home, not doing that, just being lame.

DA: Are both your parents equally culpable?

AA: No, it’s more you, because this was more your area, with your rocket scientist dad and everything, so you should have seen this as a bonding opportunity.

DA: Did it occur to you that astronomy was not something that brought my dad and me together?

AA: Well, it was an interest he had that I thought you might share. Anyone can appreciate an eclipse whether or not you know much about it.

DA: So it never occurred to you that science in general, and astronomy in particular, was a sore spot where my dad was concerned…

AA: I didn’t know your dad ruined astronomy for you … I thought it was the other way around!

(Here I need to provide some more background. My wife, you see, is famous within our family for having “ruined astronomy.” Here is the whole story, as recounted in my 2017 eclipse post:

Back in like ‘97 we were vacationing at Canyonlands National Park and my dad joined us. We went to this very remote place, far away from any lights or people, and my dad set up his telescope. For the next 2 or 3 hours (or so it felt) he gave us an astronomy lesson. I’m not a great lover of this subject myself; the only constellations I can make out are the Big Dipper and Orion’s Belt. To a simple guy like me, the constellations seem like such bullshit. It takes so much imagination for this or that collection of stars to resemble something, you might as well just make it up from scratch. “There’s the Devil’s Skateboard over there, you see, and if you follow that line of stars up—there, you see that cluster there? That’s Dracula’s Harelip.” So anyhow, my dad’s lesson was losing me entirely, I was suffering from museum knees, and then my wife heard a noise and turned on a flashlight to make a quick scan around us. “Thanks a lot,” my dad chided, “you just ruined astronomy.” (The flashlight beam had spoiled our night vision, you see.) I’ll never let my wife live this down. If she ever suffers a setback I say, “Well, you are the woman who ruined astronomy.”)

 AA: An eclipse isn’t like being lectured to … you could reclaim astronomy for yourself instead of associating it with boredom.

(At this point, my younger daughter L— happened to wander by.)

DA: L—, are you at all disappointed that we didn’t do anything to see the eclipse?

LA: What eclipse? I don’t remember. I don’t care about eclipses.

DA (to A— again): So here’s the thing. When I pointed out Orion’s belt to you, I mentioned that it’s my favorite constellation because it’s so simple and easy to see. So did you really take me for a guy who cared about astronomy? How science-y have you taken me to be, historically?

AA: I think you’re non-science-y as a deliberate act. You’re a smart guy and you’re good at math, so it’s almost like you’re trying not to care, like you want to act like it’s not a big deal because you have these negative associations…

DA: Associations based on …?

AA: On your dad, because he always lectured and made you feel lame, and small, and insignificant, and inferior.

DA: So you totally do get that he kind of ruined astronomy for me.

AA: Yes, but I thought this could be your chance to make it yours, to get it right, like a do-over. Like your entire family, Mom and L— are I, are your do-over. And this is why you’re so sorry to see me move away, because this family was your chance to have that positive father-child relationship, and now that’s coming to an end somewhat.

DA: But obviously I want you to go off to college.

AA: Yeah, but now your world is shrinking and something is coming to an end. Of course, our relationship is stronger [than what you had with your dad] which means you got it right.

DA: Do you think there’s anything pathological in my do-over thing?

AA: No, that’s totally natural, that’s the American dream, to give your kids better than what you had.

DA: Well, I certainly want to say that I didn’t become a father just to have a do-over. I wanted to have kids from so early on, I hadn’t yet realized there was anything wrong with my family. I still thought my dad was The Man.

AA: Well, yeah, that was a complex relationship, thinking your dad was The Man.

DA: But don’t all kids think their dad is The Man?

AA: Yes, but then you had to realize over time that this wasn’t a guy just to imitate like so many kids end up doing … that you had to figure out what was wrong with his parenting and not repeat that. I remember early on, when I was a little kid, how you told us that whenever you were trying to figure out how to be a good father you’d think of what your dad would do, and do the opposite.

DA: I’m a little surprised I would say that … I must have been sleep-deprived.

AA: Well, you wrote it in my journal.

(Yes, I had written something pretty scathing in her childhood journal but won’t print here. When I wrote it, on the occasion of my first Father’s Day as a father, I was definitely sleep-deprived and grumpy, but of course I could have revised it later and toned it down. But my judgment, though harsh, wasn’t wrong and I let it stand.)

DA: Well, in terms of doing the opposite of my dad, failing to get excited about the eclipse was at least consistent. My dad’s efforts around that Boulder eclipse were the rare example of him going above and beyond. There’s no way I could have come close to matching that. I don’t know how to rig up a telescope eclipse projector or make pieces of smoked glass to view the eclipse through. Of course I did have the resources to take you to where the eclipse was happening, but it didn’t occur to me you were interested. It just never came up. I didn’t even know that Uncle Bryan’s family was traveling to see it. We could have all gathered together for it … somehow we just never touched base on the whole thing. What a wasted opportunity.

AA. I thought it was one of those things where it’d be cool if it had been your idea.

DA: But you didn’t get really upset until you read what Randall Munroe said about it.

AA: Well, that was the icing on the cake, one more person saying this was an amazing experience.

DA: And a real authority too.

AA: Yes, a guy who has probably seen all kinds of cool science things but thought this was exceptional.

DA: You pointed out earlier that my dad’s lecturing made me feel small and insignificant … and I think it’s interesting that that’s exactly what looking at the stars is purported to do: to make us realize our insignificance.

AA: Yes, but in a way that doesn’t involve the ego. Stargazing is the broad and nihilistic way of feeling small, where there’s nothing we can do about it, nothing anybody can do. Knowing about rockets doesn’t matter, this is too vast. Ego is like people vs. people, whereas the heavens remind us we’re all small and insignificant, so there’s no point butting heads over it.

DA: I think that’s a passive way of appreciating nature’s grandeur, but I like an active way of fully experiencing nature’s power by butting up against it. I’m talking here about—

AA: Biking?

DA: Yes, about tackling a mountain on my bicycle to appreciate its sheer size and power, but without totally submitting. I’m putting myself against it, and though the mountain will be always be larger than me, I’m better for having flung myself at it.

AA: But there’s no way to actively fight the universe like that. Not even an astronaut can scratch the surface, and there’s nothing you can ever do in your life to take it on. An analogy I can make is that my friend is a math major at MIT so she knows a lot of math people, and most of them prefer applied math, because you can put it to use, so you’re, like, wielding it. But my friend prefers pure math, which is so heady most people will never understand the concepts or make any headway, so for her it’s like an art form, like beauty for its own sake, because the math has this unattainability. So she appreciates it in a different way, like we would appreciate music and other things that aren’t so concrete. Most people are more interested in things we can apply, because it makes us feel more powerful, more in control, more like “We’ve got this.”

DA: But you like tackling mountains.

AA: I like both realms. The attainable one is just easier. It’s easier to find the applications that give us that control. Chemistry is about what we can observe, what we can measure, experiments we can conduct, whereas astronomy can help us feel that awe, that cosmic awe. That’s the name of my band: Cosmic Awe.

DA: You’re in a band?

AA: My hypothetical band. Obviously.

DA: Had you shown this love of awe before the eclipse, and I just didn’t see it?

AA: Everybody appreciates that awe. I assumed you did too.

DA: It’s one thing to be awake to it, another entirely to plan a big road trip to go seek it. You know that I love the power of nature, apparently more than a lot of people around here who never take advantage of our regional parks, and cycling (especially mountain biking) is how I indulge that. That’s a lot easier than heading all the way to Oregon.

AA: But Oregon is more special, the rarity of this occurrence makes that worth the trip.

DA: Fair enough. So … the next full solar eclipse is in Austin, Texas in 2024. Let’s plan on it.

AA: Yes, let’s!

[Oops. That obviously didn’t happen. But at least my daughter, now a full adult living on her own, was complicit in not getting around to doing anything for it. At least we exchanged photos.  Maybe we’ll head up to Montana for the next one, in 2044! Check these pages in a couple decades for a full report.]

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ECLIPSE 2017, BAYBEE!

Introduction

Oh, shit! I’ve only got an hour and a half to write about the big eclipse! If you missed it yourself, maybe I can help give you a sense of what it was like. And if you saw it in person, clearly you love a solar eclipse and this post is for you, too.

Total solar eclipse of Aug 21, 2017

I witnessed the eclipse from the Bay Area, or to be precise my house at 37.8851 latitude, -122.27531 longitude. (Well, that’s precise enough to give you the idea, without helping you burglarize my house.) Of course I could have found a better locale, but to be honest I put off my eclipse planning until the morning of. Local options, according to a helpful website, included Indian Rock Park, UC Berkeley, Civic Center park, the public library, and the Chabot Space & Science Center. Most of these recommendations centered around who else would be there (e.g., “There are sure to be gaggles of smart Cal students viewing the solar eclipse around campus”). While I can appreciate this—after all, the most fun part for me about touring Amsterdam’s Red Light District wasn’t watching the sad, ragged prostitutes but rather the Oklahoma hayseeds ogling them—astronomy really is more of a solitary activity, don’t you think?

Part of my decision came down to weather, of course. I wasn’t about to drag my family up to the Chabot Space & Science Center if the Berkeley hills were blanketed by fog, so at dawn I did a little recon of the area, by bicycle. (Full disclosure: I’d have ridden up there anyway.) Here’s what I found:

Dang it! I decided to avoid any kind of hassle and just watch from home. My hopes weren’t entirely dashed, though, as the forecast was for the fog to burn off by 10 a.m., with the eclipse starting at 10:15. It was going to be close.

At 10 sharp, with the sky still a uniform grey, I decided to wake up my kids. (Yeah, that kind of teenager, that kind of summer.) I made like this was gonna be epic. My younger daughter grabbed her camera. We headed out back. I’d set a timer to count down until 10:15, without telling my kids the inconvenient truth that they’d probably already missed a lot of it. To be honest, I was a little vague about the details myself. I knew I was supposed to get some kind of special viewing goggles, so that we could see a progressively larger bite being taken out of the sun before things got dark, but I never got around to procuring them. My wife was similarly useless.

Speaking of my wife, I’ll confess I have no idea where she even was for the eclipse. It’s possible she didn’t know what time or even day it was to transpire. She’s not a giant astronomy fan. Back in like ‘97 we were vacationing at Canyonlands National Park and my dad joined us. We went to this very remote place, far away from any lights or people, and my dad set up his telescope. For the next 2 or 3 hours (or so it felt) he gave us an astronomy lesson. I’m not a great lover of this subject myself; the only constellations I can make out are  the Big Dipper and Orion’s Belt. My interest waned, at a very young age, after I found out my brother Max had lied to me about the Big Dipper. He said that meteorologists can predict rain based on whether the Dipper is right-side-up or upside-down. This seemed so incredibly useful that I couldn’t take the truth later. Plus, to a simple guy like me, the constellations seem like such bullshit. It takes so much imagination for this or that collection of stars to resemble something, you might as well just make it up from scratch. “There’s the Devil’s Skateboard over there, you see, and if you follow that line of stars up—there, you see that cluster there? That’s Dracula’s Harelip.”

So anyhow, my dad’s lesson was losing me entirely, I was suffering from museum knees, and then my wife heard a noise and turned on a flashlight to make a quick scan around us.  “Thanks a lot,” my dad chided, “you just ruined astronomy.” (The flashlight beam had spoiled our night vision, you see.) I’ll never let my wife live this down. If she ever suffers a setback I say, “Well, you are the woman who ruined astronomy.”

It’s tempting to say our poor eclipse preparations were a result of my intimidation in the face of science types, or my wife’s emotional scars from the Canyonlands episode, but the truth is, we’re just kind of disorganized. This poor parenting is particularly flagrant considering how well my dad had risen to the occasion for my last solar eclipse, which was in February 1979 and which I witnessed from my hometown of Boulder, Colorado. My dad, who was an actual rocket scientist, had equipped my brother Max and me with these cool little flat rectangles of smoked glass. If we stacked the two of them together, we could look right at the eclipse. This might not seem like a big deal in this modern day and age where everybody and her mom gets special eclipse glasses, but in those benighted days nobody had this. We were all just supposed to go outside and prance around and be excited until the darkness came.

And that’s what my less fortunate classmates were doing (the whole elementary school was let outside for this, and it was a brilliant sunny day) when they spied Max and me taking in the action and uttering spontaneous wow-cool noises. They crowded around and begged us to let them have a turn with our little glass pieces. This was unprecedented. I mean, sure, kids gathered around us on the playground all the time, but only to shout insults, pummel us, witness us being pummeled, and so on. They never gave us anything approaching friendly interest.

(You might think I’m exaggerating. I encountered a Bay Area native recently who has always thought of Boulder as a dreamy, hippie, flowery place where everybody is sweet and good and nice. I assure you that Boulder in the ‘70s was nothing of the kind. Schoolyard bullying was entirely tolerated and the place was full of vicious little bastards. Believe me.)

So this benign attention from my classmates was novel. Kids were actually saying “please” to me. And so, after I’d had my fill of the spectacle of the sun looking a bit like a progressively less full moon, I relented and allowed my friends a try. “Now here’s the thing,” I cautioned, “you can’t put one lens over each eye. You have to stack the little glass lenses together and look through the pair with just one eye.” (Actually, however I put it was surely less articulate than that.) I went on, “If you look through just one of them, you’ll be blinded!” My dad had driven this message home to Max and me, and we weren’t even tempted to push our luck. But my friends ignored this warning completely and put one lens over each eye.

“Man alive, that’s AMAZING!” they cried. Now they were set upon by the other kids, and of course my friends (all two of them) let their friends have a try, and they let their friends, or at least the more popular kids they wanted to curry favor with, and pretty soon half the school was getting a turn. I kind of wanted my lenses back, but the more pressing matter was that every single kid was doing it wrong, holding one lens up to each eye, so I knew the whole lot of them were going to go blind and it was all my fault. I could have yelled, “Stop it, you fools, you’ll go blind!” but I was just too shy.

Finally, some even quieter kid (who had probably been waiting in vain for a turn) said, “Isn’t everybody going to go blind?” I shrugged and said, “Yeah, I guess.” This kid went running off to get the Principal, who came running out, horrified, and confiscated Max’s and my lenses. He eventually gave them back but on the condition that we only blind ourselves with them since we had our parents’ permission to do so. Ah, those were the days.

But Max and I only got the basic eclipse gear… for our older brothers, Dad did something even cooler. He built this thingy that would attach to the non-eyepiece end of a telescope to turn it into a projector. Little wooden rods a few feet long attached to a white disk onto which an image of the eclipse would be projected. I don’t suppose this is actually a miracle of engineering, as I’ve just looked online and found similar (though frankly less elegant) versions depicted. But back then, nobody ever took initiative like this. Boulder dads were smart, I guess, but in my experience they were either absentminded professor types always puttering in the lab, or granola-loving hikers wandering around on trails, or the generic grunting type of dad who seemed to always be watching the Bronco or Buffs game. These men didn’t send their kids to school with a precious telescope, tripod, and handmade thingy to worry about breaking.

And so my older brothers, Geoff and Bryan, were even bigger heroes than Max and I were. The whole fricking junior high crowded around them as they assembled the amazing eclipse-viewing apparatus, and everybody oohed and aahed at the sight of that bitten-into sun. In fact, one teacher was overheard telling her colleague, “I heard Dr. Albert is an honest-to-god rocket scientist, plus he’s tall and has broad shoulders. I would sleep with him in a heartbeat.” I might be exaggerating a bit here, because a) I wasn’t actually there, this being at my brothers’ school, and b) I totally made that up. But it could have happened.

The newspaper showed up, and my brothers with their telescope apparatus made the front page—big photo, story, the whole bit!  The reporter spelled both their names wrong … I mean, he wasn’t even close. It was like “Brien and Gorrlfley,” almost like he deliberately got them wrong out of spite, or so it seemed to me back then.

Getting back to 2017, and this recent eclipse: when my timer chimed, indicating the official start of the totality, I yelled, “Kids, it has begun!” I tried to get them to prance around joyfully but they seemed a bit disappointed in the reality of the spectacle. At this point, special eclipse goggles would have been useless. What would we have even looked at? From across the fence I heard my neighbor yell, “Where’s the sun?”

Now, don’t think I didn’t bring any gear to the event. I did have my camera and made a movie. Look, here it is!

My favorite part of the eclipse was when my neighbor called out over the fence, “Dana, I’m so glad to have shared this profound experience with you.”

But the eclipse wasn’t over yet! I ran inside and called my brother Bryan. He was witnessing amazing things even as we spoke, having taken his lucky family on a long road trip to Culver, Oregon, near Bend (i.e., in the middle of nowhere). I tried to find Culver on Google Maps. “It’s near this hippie commune called Madras,” Bryan explained unhelpfully. Here’s the map.

Bryan was so excited. “Dude, did you see the Bailey’s Beads?” he asked. “Did you see the Diamond Ring?” I’d never heard of either of these phenomena in my life, but I confidently answered, “We did not.” He hadn’t either, somehow, despite everything else being perfect.

“It wasn’t pitch dark,” he said breathlessly, “but we could feel it getting colder. The streetlights came on. We could see planets, but not stars. We were supposed to see these snake-y shadow things, like snakes slithering over the ground. Maybe the hippies up in Madras could see those. It was so, so unbelievably cool. The shadow moves at 4,000 mph across the ground. We could see this mountain range in the distance that wasn’t dark yet.”

I asked about this thing only lasting for two minutes. That really didn’t match my memory of it. “No, it’s the total darkness that lasts for two minutes [you fricking moron],” he said. “The bite being gradually taken out of the sun takes like” (what did he say, an hour? two hours?). “I’m still watching the sun come back out from behind it, even as we speak [you ignorant fool]!”

I asked if he had protective goggles. “Yeah, stupid protective goggles!” he said. “They’re so lame, they’ve got these warnings all over them, across every printable surface, warning how dangerous this endeavor is, saying it every way they can think of, saying ‘Do not look for more than 3 minutes.’ Why not? I’m gonna look for an hour and then write them a letter!”

Here are a few of my nieces rocking their über-cool eclipse goggles:

I bemoaned my lost opportunity to travel to a good eclipse-viewing spot where I could inculcate in my offspring the majesty of the celestial heavens. “Well, there are lots of lunar eclipses you could watch with them,” Bryan offered. I made the mistake of admitting that I’m not real clear on what a lunar eclipse even is. He started to explain it, and I felt like a kid again. A stupid kid.

“You see, the Earth rotates around the sun on one plane. The moon rotates around the earth in a slightly different plane. When these line up you get an eclipse. So there’s the shadow of the moon that’s smaller than the earth, so it crosses over the humina humina humina and then there’s this arctangent and blah blah blah penumbra, and then over here you’ve got your lunar orbital plane 5.1 degrees from the ecliptic, and then [unintelligible], and you are getting very sleepy, keep your eyes on the swinging watch, you are going down, down, down….”

Suddenly my neck jerked. “Hello, hello, hello?” Bryan was asking. “Sorry, I was talking to Mute,” I said sheepishly. “So … tell me about your road trip. Tell me about the venue. [Tell me something I can grasp.]”

“Dude, so, you need to get signed up on Twitter, because NASA has some really cool stuff. I’ve seen countless lunar eclipses because I’ve been on guard for them,” Bryan said, apparently in earnest. So if there’s anything I’ve learned from this eclipse, it’s that there are even nerdier people in this world than I.

“[Enough with the lunar eclipse!] So tell me about your road trip,” I persisted. “Tell me about Culver.”

“Oh yeah! So we got here at like 3 a.m. No problem parking. Biggest issue is that the town didn’t really prep for the eclipse crowd. Fortunately there are 3 San-O-lets left over from the crawdad festival (kinda bummed I missed that), but they were totally overflowing, each with this mountain of crap almost up to the hole, and no toilet paper of course. That was pretty gross. On the plus side, the mayor came through with all these pans of cornbread, also left over from the crawdad festival, which she was trying to get people to take. We ended up accepting a 20x30-inch pan of cornbread which we ate with chili. It wasn’t bad. Apparently here in Oregon they believe that incarcerated people should work, so the cornbread was baked by prisoners.”

 “So you found all these files baked into it?” I asked. He replied, “Yeah, and wads of spit too. But good.”

That’s almost my entire story of the big eclipse. But then there was this sad epilogue yesterday evening. My older daughter was sitting at the computer looking really glum. My wife was concerned and trying to draw her out, to figure out the problem. College prep worries? A falling out with a friend? My wife was getting nowhere.

Finally I said, half-jokingly, “Is it the eclipse?” My daughter almost smiled. “It is, actually,” she said. She was touring the Internet reading about the eclipse and came across Randall Munroe’s xkcd cartoon about it. If you hover your mouse over the cartoon you get an extra caption: “It was—without exaggeration—the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.” Munroe is to my daughter what Justin Bieber is to most teenage girls, so this was a profound statement. It was dawning on my daughter just how much she’d missed out on by having a deadbeat, incurious, non-science-obsessed dad.

I had to make it up to her. So we looked up the next big eclipse, which hits Texas in 2024. We studied the eclipse path online. It goes right through Austin, a city I’ve always wanted to visit. “Look,” I told her, “your Uncle Peter raced on the national team with Lance Armstrong. Surely Lance will remember him. Lance has a place in Austin. A big ol’ ranch, I’ll bet. I’ll send a few e-mails, call in some favors, and get us invited.  I’m getting such an early start … surely this can be arranged. So. Count on it. You, me, Lance … ECLIPSE 2024, BAYBEE!”

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