Shock and Awe: Astronomers Say First-Time Eclipse Watchers Should Prepare to be Wowed

“The experience of totality is ineffable,” says Australia-based author, clinical psychologist and eclipse chaser Kate Russo. “There are no words to describe it.” 

But after witnessing 13 total eclipses and interviewing thousands of people about their eclipse experiences, Russo has come up with a shorthand way of describing what it’s like. She uses the acronym SPACED, which stands for: Sense of wrongness, Primal fear, Awe, Connectedness with insignificance, Euphoria, Desire to repeat. 

Russo, who wrote about first-time eclipse experiences in her 2017 book, “Being in the Shadow,” says the cocktail of emotions is similar to how some people describe a religious conversion. And it’s all so unexpected, even when viewers fully understand what’s going to happen. “You know that the moon’s going to be moving in front of the sun, and that there will be darkness that comes in and totality. You hear that it's spectacular and awesome and incredible,” Russo says. “That's all fine on a cognitive level. But the experience of it is very different, because it happens to us on a very visceral level, on a very body level.” 

The sense of wrongness and primal fear go hand in hand. “The sun disappears, and the sun is our life force. It is the one constant thing that we can rely on,” Russo says. “It's not like you're thinking it's the end of the world, but there's part of you that responds in such a primitive way.” 

It’s probably more helpful to compare the total eclipse experience to other awe-inspiring events rather than to astronomical phenomena. Perhaps you’ve had euphoric, goose-bump-inducing moments at a concert or a sporting event—both of which happen, not coincidentally, around other people experiencing a similar emotion. “They call that collective effervescence,” Russo says. “Because you're feeling all those things, everybody else is feeling it, too. So if you're in a crowd, that ripple, that buzz, lifts you up.” 

Brad Hoehne of the Columbus Astronomical Society says the total eclipse experience also pulls back the curtain to reveal “a clockwork universe. You get a sense of the moon moving across the sky, of the sun being a place. And for a few brief moments, you realize, ‘I am living on a planet that is going around the sun. Things are moving, and they are far more vast and extraordinary than I am able to keep in my little human brain.’ ” 

The fleeting nature of a total eclipse adds to the emotional experience; all of those feelings are condensed into two or three minutes. “You come out of it feeling blown over. It's overwhelming, like getting off a roller coaster for the first time,” says Hoehne, who also heads the John Glenn Astronomy Park in the Hocking Hills. “Everybody, after they see the first one, the very first thing they do is they look to their friends, with tears running down their eyes, and they go, ‘When is the next one? I want to do this again!’ ”  

This story is from the March 2024 issue of Columbus Monthly.