Fred Espenak, an astrophysicist known as Mr. Eclipse who created maps and charts that eclipse chasers like him used to pinpoint the best locations to witness the breathtaking choreography of celestial bodies, died on June 1 at his home in Portal, Ariz., near the border of New Mexico. He was 73.
The cause was idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, said his wife, Patricia Totten Espenak, known as Ms. Eclipse. The Espenaks met during a solar eclipse in India and danced to Bonnie Tyler’s ballad “Total Eclipse of the Heart” at their wedding.
During five decades of chasing eclipses, Mr. Espenak wrote several books about them, notably “Five Millennium Canon of Solar Eclipses” (2006), a two-volume, 742-page treatise written with the Belgian meteorologist Jean Meeus; operated four websites devoted to celestial statistics, including MrEclipse.com; and witnessed 52 solar eclipses, 31 of which were total.
“When you see a total eclipse, you will realize for the first time what the meaning of awesome is,” Mr. Espenak told Time magazine in 2017. “Everything else is mundane.”
Mr. Espenak saw his first total eclipse in 1970 as a nerdy teenager, driving 600 miles from his home on Staten Island to a grassy field behind a motel in North Carolina.
“It was a bright, crisp, sunny morning,” he recalled on the New York Times podcast “The Daily” in 2024, during the frenzy preceding a total solar eclipse in North America. “There weren’t any clouds at all in the sky. And I was amazed that outside the back of the motel, in this grassy field, there were dozens and dozens of people with telescopes out.”
He set up his own telescope, then waited. By the afternoon, as the moon inched closer and closer, the sky had dimmed and the temperature had fallen. Birds sang their evening songs, confused by the time.
Finally, the remaining light evaporated.
“And you look around the horizon,” Mr. Espenak said. “And you’re seeing the colors of sunrise or sunset 360 degrees around the horizon because you’re looking out the edge of the moon’s shadow. And looking back up into the sky, the sun is gone now.”
People in the field began cheering. So did he.
“And I immediately started thinking that this can’t be a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” he said. “I’ve got to see this again.”
After studying physics in college and graduate school, Mr. Espenak worked for a software company that had contracts with NASA to design data analysis programs for satellites. He later joined NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center to research planetary atmospheres.
In the early 1990s, Mr. Espenak began writing NASA’s eclipse bulletins with the Canadian meteorologist Jay Anderson. He also started a website for the space agency devoted to eclipse data. His goal: simplify and democratize complicated data so nonscientists sky gazers could geek out on the data, too.
All the while, he kept chasing eclipses — traveling to Kenya, Indonesia, Mexico, Aruba, Turkey, Zambia, Antarctica, Spain, Libya and beyond.
His most memorable trip was one he made in 1995 to India, where he met a chemistry teacher who eventually became Ms. Eclipse. Until then, Patricia Totten had never seen a total eclipse.
“She was in tears after totality,” Mr. Espenak said on “The Daily.” “She had been waiting so long to see it.”
Fred Espenak Jr. was born on Jan. 19, 1952, in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., and grew up on Staten Island. His father was a tool and dye maker who also owned a bait shop. His mother, Asie (Clementsen) Espenak, oversaw the home.
Fred looked through a telescope for the first time when he was 8.
“I was visiting my grandparents on Long Island when a neighbor boy invited me to see the moon through his new telescope,” he wrote on Astropixels.com, one of his websites. “Just one look and I was hooked.”
He waged a six-month campaign for his own telescope. That Christmas, his parents relented; one of his presents was a 60-millimeter Tasco refractor.
“I enjoyed that little scope immensely even though I really didn’t know what I was doing,” Mr. Espenak recalled. “At the same time, my interests were drawn in many other directions: turtles and frogs, chemistry experiments, rock collecting, microscope studies, dinosaurs, electric circuits and ant farms.”
In high school, he became a devoted reader of Sky & Telescope magazine and frequently visited the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. Not long after receiving his driver’s license, he drove to North Carolina to lay eyes on his first solar eclipse.
“I made a promise to myself that I was going to get to that eclipse in 1970 to see it, because I thought it was a one chance in a lifetime to see a total eclipse of the sun,” Mr. Espenak said on “The Daily.”
Watching these events gave him a sense of “belonging to this incredible universe,” he said, and the realization that “we’re a part of this fantastic cosmic wheel of motion in the solar system.”
Mr. Espenak’s first two marriages ended in divorce. He married Ms. Totten in 2006.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Espenak is survived by his stepchildren, Andrea Marie Totten and Russell Eugene Totten, and two step-grandchildren.
After he retired from NASA in 2009, Mr. Espenak and his wife abandoned civilization and moved to Portal, Ariz., where they built a house in a community called Arizona Sky Village.
“Arizona Sky Village was set up to provide astronomers with access to clear, dark skies where they can enjoy and share their hobby with like-minded people,” the community says on its website. “Strict planning rules ensure the night sky remains dark to reveal its natural beauty.”
Streetlights are prohibited. Driving with headlights on is a no-no. Mr. Eclipse told “The Daily” that when he looks up at night “it’s like the sky a hundred years ago before cities encroached on all of the country.”
In other words, heaven.
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