These things are very hard to put words to. Can I just say?
There are insufficient superlatives in the English language.
No matter what I do, no matter how much I describe it, no matter how many videos you watch,
they all fall short of being able to witness this for yourself.
But you can always tell when someone's seen a total eclipse
because when you ask them if they've have seen a total eclipse
and they say, "Oh, I think so," they haven’t seen a total eclipse.
Because you just never forget. You never forget that feeling.
[Eclipse chasers travel the world to witness total solar eclipses.]
[We spoke to nine of them about their obsession.]
My suggestion to anyone who is seeing this for the first time is:
Don't try to photograph it. Please don't.
I can just envision people watching the eclipse through their iphone.
You don't want to do that. You want to take it and look at It with your own two eyes.
If you're nearby, and you hear that, oh, it's going to be a 99% partial.
I'll see an almost total solar eclipse.
There is no such thing as an almost total solar eclipse. They are completely different phenomenon.
It's like getting five out of six numbers right on the Jackpot.
If you got five out of six, you were close. But you lost.
We've only been clouded out once. Knock on Wood! Oh, my gosh. I shouldn't even mention it.
In 1977, which was north of Bogota, Colombia,
nice blue skies, one little puffy cumulus cloud came out of nowhere.
It's obscured the sun for a couple of minutes, and it was a long couple of minutes.
And then, you've got the ones that are like in 1999. It was raining during the partial phases.
And just before totality, a blue hole appeared in the sky and slowly crawled over the sun.
One friend of mine described it as the miracle eclipse.
It's Black... Black, Black, Black like the blackest hole you can ever imagine,
ringed with these beautiful wispy white coronal streamers.
Bright stars and planets are visible in daytime sky.
And you see the colors of sunset in every direction you look around the horizon.
It's not like night, it's not like day, it's not like twilight.
It's like nothing you've ever felt before.
Can you imagine how a primitive ancestors would have felt?
Suddenly our world completely changing, and then them not knowing that the sun was going to come back.
How Frightening?
In our everyday lives, we look up to the sky and what we see mostly is this two-dimensional dome.
And stars and planets and the moon seemed to creep across that.
When I saw a total eclipse of the sun, it catapulted me into a three-dimensional universe.
You experience the music of the spheres,
as Kepler called them, the mechanics of the solar system, in action.
Insignificance is not a word I would use.
Actually, I feel very special, and all people should feel special that we're alive and intelligent and conscious,
and that we're able to be aware of our cosmos.
I realized that of course the solar system is creating that total eclipse.
But it's also the solar system looking back at It.
It makes you feel a part of the earth. It makes you feel a part of the cosmos.
It makes you feel a part of every single person you're standing there with.
Just for a brief time, we're not separate. We're all the same.
It gives you life insights that you normally get only at times when you experience a loss.
How life stands still. You have to take life day by day.
You understand that all the things that we worry about are really irrelevant.
And life is precious. It's fleeting.
And it's about the moments you have, and the people that you share it with.
One of my latest books is The 21st Century Canon of Eclipses.
So it's got maps for every eclipse now through the end of the century.
And you're flipping page to page to page. And the years are turning, just like Rod Taylor in The Time Machine.
But you're not in the time machine. You're getting older and older.
And at some point, I'm not going to make one of those eclipses.
I've already told my daughter where she needs to go to watch the 2079 eclipse on May 1, 2079.
So I don't expect to make it, but I hope she can.
The ability to predict this is magical. We all say, "We don't know what's going to happen in the future."
This, assuredly, we can predict. And I knew it as young as 38 years ago, and it was way in the future.
So that's it. The last solar eclipse to be seen on this continent in this century.
And as I said, not until August 21, 2017, will another eclipse be visible from North America.
That's 38 years from now. May the shadow of the moon fall on a world at peace.
ABC news of course we'll bring you a complete report on that next eclipse 38 years from now.