Most of us will simply put on special glasses and go outside to see Monday’s solar eclipse.
But the world’s elite eclipse-chasers will be on the move this weekend in pursuit of the perfect view.
And they’re giving themselves the best chances to actually see the display with flights to multiple destinations and hotel rooms on hold so they can choose the location with the best weather at the last minute.
The moon will completely cover the sun in a 115-mile “zone of totality” running north and east through 12 states from Eagle Pass, Texas — where it will go dark for 4 minutes and 26 seconds — to the northern tip of Maine, which will have 3 minutes and 21 seconds of totality.
Typical among the chasers is Daniel Mescon, 39, a producer for CNBC from Queens, New York.
Mescon will choose between hotel reservations in Dallas, Indianapolis, Buffalo, Albany and Waterville, Maine at the latest possible minute. He has flights on hold for Texas and Indiana, or may end up driving north.
He figures it will cost $2,000 to $2,500 for himself and his wife Elisabeth Person-Mescon, 38, to enjoy three or four minutes of mind-blowing visuals.
Mescon hopes the experience will take less out of him than the 2017 eclipse, which he managed on a budget of less than $1,000.
He drove nine hours from Fairfield, Iowa, in the southeast corner of the state, to a soybean field in Allensville, Kentucky (population around 200 and an hour north of Nashville) where he witnessed the eclipse.
After the sun reemerged, he began his drive back and wound up “in a convenience store in Tiny Town, Kentucky, and saw this gigantic vein standing out on my head. I was completely tired and dehydrated. But it was 100 percent worth it.” He had to sleep in his car that night.
Dr. Gordon Telepun, a plastic surgeon, 66, from Decatur, Alabama, will watch with a group of 22 friends and relatives.
He had booked hotel rooms in both Burnet, TX, (about 50 miles northwest of Austin) and Jackson, Missouri (20 miles northwest of Cape Cape Girardeau, MO). But already a forecast of clouds across the southern part of the eclipse led him to cancel Texas.
Telepun and his group shrugged off $800 in blown hotel fees each. Appropriately, they’ll watch the action in the Show Me state — with the likely total cost per participant $1,600 to $2,000 for lodging alone.
But that’s nothing compared to his first two globetrotting eclipse chases. In 2001, he dropped $4,000 for a trip to Zambia.
“It was June, the middle of the dry season and we saw a three minute and 32 second eclipse. It was perfect,” he said.
The experience proved so good that he went back to Africa in December 2002 and spent another $4,000 on a chase through Zimbabwe. It turned into a risky adventure.
“We were in two beaten up African buses. The electrical system in one went down. We got stuck on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere,” recalled Telepun who invented a device for timing the precise moment when an eclipse will take place wherever the user is located.
“We were stranded for eight hours; it got dark and the temperature dropped. But the sky was pitch black and the stars were beautiful.”
For Jim Head, of Minocqua, Wisconsin, who’s heading to Youngstown, Ohio, in time for Monday, this eclipse is everything. “I’m 71 years old,” he told The Post, “and the next total eclipse in North America will not be for another 20 years. By then, I’ll be 91 and it might be tough to catch it.” Plus, he added. “the sun is at its maximum right now. So, you might see more prominence off the edge of the sun when the moon blocks most of its light.”
Joe Rao, 67, from Putnam, NY, a former meteorologist on 1010 WINS radio and guest lecturer at the Hayden Planetarium, started with four different hotel reservations for himself and his family, all with access to the line of totality.
He’s given up the rooms in Dallas, Texas, Little Rock, Arkansas, and Syracuse, NY, and plans to watch in Plattsburgh, NY, where he believes he will have the clearest view.
“My only worry is there tend to be cumulus clouds up there,” he said. “It will be a little stressful, but we’ll take our chances.”
Rao was a paid guide on a cruise ship through the Southern Ocean to Antarctica in 2021, but failed to see that eclipse because of the weather. “You feel bummed,” he said, adding that he’s traveled for 13 eclipses and “was skunked” twice.
“In Colombia, in 1977, which ran me $800, the sky was perfectly clear, except for one cloud in front of the sun. We saw a red rainbow. But that was not what we went there for.”
Courtesy of David Makepeace
Rao has kept his trips economical. The most expensive, in 2006, was to Turkey at a cost of $1,500, where the cloud cover cleared as he exited the airport.
Others spend bigger. David Makepeace, a Canadian media producer, is paying $1,850 to see the eclipse in Mazatlan, Mexico.
But he claims to have blown some $250,000 on26 eclipses, with jaunts to Antacrtica on an ice breaker, to the Libyan desert and to an atoll off Australia which cost $24,000 for a group, arriving on a chartered oil-rig service ship.
And some spring for private jets. Mike Giordano, partner with Cirrus Aviation Services, has clients lined up for trips to Mexico City and San Antonio, Texas.
They’ll each be spending some $40,000 to fly, land, watch and take off for home minutes later.
“If the weather changes we’ll go elsewhere,” he said. “In 2017, I had a group that paid $32,000. We were supposed to go to Casper, Wyoming, and, at the last minute, we decided that would not be the spot.
“So, we wound up in Idaho Falls. We landed, watched the eclipse and left.”
Whether baller or basic, the chasers all agree that the trouble is worth it.
Brett Tingley, 39, who is managing editor of Space.com sought out a partial eclipse which creates a ring of fire around the moon in the desert near Ely, Nevada, solo last year but will load up his wife and children to drive from North Carolina to Cape Girardeau for the big one on Monday.
“There is nothing like an eclipse to know your place in the solar system,” he said. “The sun, moon and Earth line up, and you have to be in the right place at the right time in our solar system to see this amazing event.”
