New Hampshire will be in the path of totality for a solar eclipse on April 8. For many, a total solar eclipse is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. But for others, it happens twice.
We asked if you had witnessed the last total solar eclipse in New England, and Greg Johnson of Bradford, New Hampshire, reached out with his memories from the 1963 total solar eclipse, which he viewed from Acadia National Park.
NHPR’s All Things Considered host Julia Furukawa sat down with Johnson at his Bradford home to hear his recollections from 60 years ago.
Transcript:
What motivated you to dedicate an entire day to this adventure?
Well, from an early age I had been interested in astronomy and so the interest was always there. And my friends too, they were perhaps not as fanatical as I was, but they were up for it. An eclipse is a very special thing. And it's not just a jaunt, but it's quite a rare thing, and it can be quite inspiring to give you a different perspective on really what our position in the world or in the universe is. So it's not a trivial thing. It's also a hell of a lot of fun. I'm not going to deny that.
Just before the very beginning, the clouds opened like a curtain. Using a little projector I had on the telescope, we could see that the moon was now taking a little bite out of the sun. And we were just overjoyed, and everybody around us was. And then we just fidgeted around, [and] looked at the image of the sun from my little telescope. Well, the air was changing. I mean, it was dusk, really. Animals were probably reacting to this as well. The colors were, the contrasts were, more marked. What I had forgotten, and I probably not too many people knew, was that there was an astronomer from Brown University, Charles Smiley, his name was, and he had arranged to travel in a jet fighter following the path of totality, staying in the shadow of the moon. And just at the moment of totality, when we looked up at just a ring of fire around the sun, Smiley went by in his plane. The sonic boom hit us, went crashing down, and then reverberating up from the lake and from the surrounding hills. This could have been scripted in Hollywood.
How did you feel about your place in the universe when you saw this, as one human being?
For me, the spiritual is something that is a radical awareness of the validity and the existence of the other. Now the other can be another person, it can be another mode of thought, it can be another space and time. But it is something that is not you, but contains you in a way. And when you see this universe so vividly displayed and you're in the center of it, you feel a connection with other parts of existence that usually we just kind of don't pay much attention to. But you see that and you say, 'Alright, I'm here. That created me.' I'm sure it's an experience that many people feel, perhaps in different ways. This way happens to be one of the most massive ways, because it's not infinity, but it is as close as we're going to get to infinity. It's also not forever.
What would you say to somebody who is on the fence about taking time to go see the eclipse? What would be your pitch to them?
For people who are interested in things cosmic, that's really what they are, it's one of the pinnacles of experiences that it's possible to have here while we're on the surface of the Earth. If it doesn't move you, well, it doesn't. I'm not going to judge. But if you're open to it, it's like nothing else.
