Umbraphiles, have you logged your eclipses at the Eclipse Chasers website? All the cool kids are doing it.
Eclipse chaser “sounds better than eclipse stalker, paparazzi, or voyeur which are more accurate terms,” states site author Bill Kramer, a veteran of ten TSEs. “If you stay in one place all your life, the chances of seeing a total solar eclipse are quite slim. As a consequence, in order to see one or more total eclipses of the sun one must travel to see them. And that is how you become an Eclipse Chaser.”
Kramer has painstakingly assembled a nice little hub for chasers to keep track of their travels, surveil each other, and find out who else was there on the day of totality.
The Eclipse Chaser site allows you to find and claim any total, annular and/or partial eclipse, dating from 1806. (So, if you’re 211 years old, you might need to get a teenager to help you with the log in.) Add everything you can remember about your eclipse experiences, hit “save”, and your name, shadow time, chase success and other details will be posted automatically to the user summary—314 names, and counting!
Your log will include a delicious quantity of too much information you never knew you wanted to know.
Mine looks like this:
Eclipse count: 7, of which 6 were total and 1 were annular types. The remaining were partials.
Number of Saros Series seen is 6
Time in shadow of the moon: 17h 32m 31.9s. (all partial plus total plus annular)
Total Eclipse time: 21m 9.0s (1,269.0 seconds)
Annular Eclipse time: 6m 50.8s (410.8 seconds)
Central shadow time (A+T): 27m 59.8s
The site is fantastic resource for past eclipse data and includes fun auxiliary information about safety and equipment, collectibles, a gallery of images, how to chase an eclipse (there are five steps! who knew), and even boring transits.
Just select “join log” and you’re on your way. Don’t rush your entries—it make take a few tries to drop a pin on exactly where you were standing in the shadow—and don’t forget, like I did until later, to use the drop down menu to select the exact weather conditions (fun detail, Bill!). No worries, though—you can go back and edit your entry at any time.