For the first 40 years of his life, Eugene Chiang was unmoved by eclipses. He had heard the stories from his colleague Alex Filipenko, one of the most prolific eclipse chasers on the Berkeley campus, probably on the planet. He had read the accounts. He had seen the videos. And every time, his reaction was roughly the same: the moon passes in front of the sun, it gets a little darker, fine.
Then he drove an RV into an ordinary field in Oregon.
“It almost felt like the end of the world, except in a good way,” says Chiang, professor of Astronomy and Earth and Planetary Science (EPS) at UC Berkeley. “Like, somehow, it was not sad, but happy. Some cosmic unfolding. Practically spiritual.”
He is describing the 2017 eclipse, his first total. In the seconds before totality, a shadow the width of an entire landscape moved across the field. Stars appeared. The diamond flash. Then the corona, the outermost part of the Sun’s atmosphere, which Chiang swears filled the sky, even though he knows the measurements say otherwise. “It just felt like it was literally blowing past me,” he says. His wife, who had once cut short a stargazing session because it was cold and uninteresting, turned to him when it was over and said two things he has never forgotten: That was magical. And: When’s the next one?
The answer was Mexico. Then, this August, Bilbao and San Sebastián with Cal Discoveries Travel. And in 2027, Algeria.
The universe is silent at that point. Why should I be the one talking?”
Chiang will lead both tours as an enrichment lecturer, bringing the same framework he uses in the Berkeley classroom: physics is not a separate domain from everyday life, it is the same set of principles operating at different scales. The red of hydrogen prominences visible during totality comes from the same quantum mechanics as the blue glow of a neon sign. The eclipses of distant exoplanets, which block at most one percent of their star’s disc, have revealed the periods, sizes, atmospheres, and compositions of entire planetary systems. A total solar eclipse, then, is not just an event. It is the local, spectacular version of something happening continuously across the galaxy.
“It’s only interesting if it can be unified,” he says. “If what’s out there actually relates to what’s down here.”
On the Algeria tour, he plans to go further back in time. Ancient eclipse records, painstakingly kept by civilizations across North Africa and the Middle East, turn out to be scientifically essential. The moon’s orbit has been slowly expanding due to tidal interactions with Earth, and if physicists get that model even slightly wrong, their predicted eclipse paths will not match the historical record. The ancients were watching the same shadow we chase today, and their observations are still calibrating our theories.
As for what modern science gains from those four minutes of totality, Chiang is honest about the limits. The Parker Solar Probe is practically swimming in the corona. Spacecraft have been studying solar prominences for decades. Ground-based eclipse data, he admits, is unlikely to compete with years of continuous satellite observations. “The low-hanging fruit has been picked,” he says. What totality offers now is something the instruments cannot: the full sensory experience of standing inside an astronomical event. The air cools. The crowd goes quiet. The corona expands above you.
“Everyone makes meaning of it in their own way,” Chiang says. “Nobody should get in the way of that.”
He will not narrate during totality. He will not lecture. “The universe is silent at that point,” he says. “Why should I be the one talking?”
His honest pitch to anyone on the fence between Spain and Algeria, or considering both: do not make the mistake he made for four decades. A partial eclipse and a total solar eclipse are not different points on the same scale. They are categorically different experiences, the way a photograph of the ocean is categorically different from standing in it.
“Everyone on the planet Earth should see at least one,” he says. “And these are great years to do it.”
Professor Eugene Chiang leads Cal Discoveries Travel‘s Total Solar Eclipse tours in Bilbao and San Sebastián, Spain (August 2026); and Algeria (2027). Visit alumni.berkeley.edu/travel to learn more.
Please visit https://alumni.berkeley.edu/tours for more information on our Tours.
