The Day the Sun Became a Black Star

For thirty-seven years, I had lived my life without witnessing one of the most spectacular phenomena our universe has to offer. As someone who writes about the night sky for a living, this admission feels almost embarrassing, like a chef who has never tasted a perfectly ripe tomato or a musician who has never heard a symphony performed live. I had always been captivated by eclipses from afar, drawn to photographs and stories of that peculiar moment when day briefly transforms into an unnatural twilight, when the sun itself seems to vanish and reveal something deeper and more mysterious about our place in the cosmos. But somehow, the opportunity had never presented itself. The path of totality always seemed to fall somewhere else, at some other time, and I had resigned myself to the notion that this was simply an experience that happened to other people.

That all changed when I joined the team at Space.com and my professional life suddenly became anchored to the movements of planets, moons, and stars. I was presented with an extraordinary opportunity: to travel to Spain and report on the total solar eclipse of August 12, witnessing totality from the small village of Valoria la Buena in the heart of the country. I would be joining a team of citizen scientists from the Dynamic Eclipse Broadcast Initiative, a volunteer organization guided by professional astronomers from Southern Illinois University, with funding support from NASA and the National Science Foundation. Our mission was to capture data on the sun’s corona while streaming a live feed to a NASA webcast from within the path of totality. Months of preparation followed, filled with emails and video calls and technical discussions, until finally the day arrived when I found myself standing in a taxi rank outside the Madrid-Barajas Airport, passport in hand, ready to embark on what would become one of the most profound experiences of my life.

The journey to Valoria la Buena was an adventure in itself, marked by the kind of small cultural challenges that make travel so memorable. Hours of mild embarrassment ensued as I navigated the Spanish capital with broken language skills and expressive hand gestures, eventually finding my way to the Chamartín-Clara Campoamor station and onto a high-speed train heading north to Valladolid, a beautiful city whose pronunciation I butchered for the entirety of my stay. Upon arrival, I was met by Charles Greenwald’s brother-in-law Santiago and nephew Andreas, who had traveled from Guadalajara, Mexico to witness the eclipse. Andreas, something of a coffee aficionado, led us on a brief detour to hunt down quality beans before we embarked on the final thirty-minute car ride that would take us deep into the path of totality. The group I was joining represented a beautiful cross-section of humanity: half spoke fluent English while the other half spoke none at all, creating an intoxicating blend of meaningful conversation conducted through a combination of language, gesture, and universal human connection, all set against the backdrop of magnificent home-cooked food prepared by Santiago, his wife Gaby, and Andreas.

Meeting Charles Greenwald in person was something of a revelation. In the months leading up to the eclipse, I had only known him through sporadic video calls and email exchanges, but now I discovered the full depth of his remarkable story. As an undergraduate, he had studied optics and physics before ultimately pursuing a career in aviation, which nowadays sees him fly around the world for FedEx. Over dinner that first night, I learned that he was also a retired colonel in the United States Air Force, having flown some thirty-five different aircraft ranging from F15 fighters to C-17 Globemasters over the course of his military career. He had first discovered the DEB initiative in an article from Sky & Telescope magazine during a brief stopover in Sydney, Australia, and after heeding the call for volunteers, he spent the next year assembling a team of family and students to capture the Great American Eclipse of 2024. Several members of our group were veterans of that first campaign, while others, like myself, would be experiencing totality for the very first time. But it was Charles’s passion that brought everything together, that transformed a group of strangers into a cohesive team united by a common purpose.

The day before the eclipse, we traveled to our observing site, a perfect location with a near-pristine view to the west, which was crucial given that the sun would be less than ten degrees above the horizon at totality. The team had managed to convince a kindly resident to let us set up outside their villa and use their internet connection to ensure connectivity for the NASA stream. There had been a moment of drama earlier that day when the resident’s son, upon hearing that his parents had agreed to let strangers access their internet, cautioned against the arrangement, fearing that Charles’s story was too fanciful and that he might be some kind of scammer. Thankfully, a quick Google search straightened everything out, and we didn’t have the ethernet plug pulled on our operation. As I practiced with my own humble camera setup, a Fujifilm X-T5 with an XF 70-300 millimeter lens and a solar filter, I had the opportunity to connect with the other team members. Arath, a student at the Universidad de Guadalajara, dreamed of pursuing a masters degree in mathematics at Cambridge University upon completing his studies. Nearby, Aimar and Aaron, a pair of passionate high school students from Spain, worked on their own mathematical equations in the patch of shade cast by a solitary umbrella, having reached out to join the group after hearing about the DEB on a university noticeboard. I spent the afternoon torn between adjusting my camera settings and engaging in conversations about everything from mathematics to journalism, all while the Spanish sun slowly cooked us from above.

The night before the eclipse, I sought a little solitude on the terrace of our accommodation. Laying back on the astroturf, I traced out the constellations above and allowed my anticipation to build. As I watched, a single Perseid meteor raced through the stars of the Summer Triangle, a stunning opening act for the solar spectacle to come. The day of the eclipse itself arrived with a strange nervous energy that made me feel as if I were vibrating on a cellular level. I was hours away from seeing something that had terrified and awed my ancestors, drawn adventurers halfway across the globe, and allowed scientists to understand the true nature of our parent star. Charles, on the other hand, confessed to being rested and ready, despite working through a last-minute technical glitch. The fan on the computer responsible for sending commands to the telescope had simply given out, at the height of Spanish summer, in the middle of an oppressive heatwave. In what would become one of the most memorable displays of human ingenuity I have ever witnessed, the team built a homemade heatsink, freezing wet towels overnight and placing them at the bottom of a shaded cardboard box with foil between the towel and the computer, supplemented by a hand fan and cooler blocks from the freezer. Human ingenuity versus technology and a Spanish heatwave, and we would know the victor soon enough.

As the moment of the eclipse approached, something beautiful happened in Valoria la Buena. Half the town must have turned out to experience the event. Citizen scientists and family mingled with friends and locals as an impromptu block party got underway. I set up my camera close to Charles and the DEB telescope, double-checking my solar filter and settings while glancing paranoid at the eclipse timings on my laptop. Soon, a semi-circle of enthusiastic locals surrounded us, curious about everything from the eclipse and the DEB to science journalism. As the moment of first contact arrived and the moon took its first tentative bite out of the sun, I immediately forgot how to use a camera, remembered, and snapped my first photograph of the eclipsed sun. My first instinct was that something was ineffably wrong. The sight had activated an ancient and superstitious circuit in my brain that insisted the sun simply shouldn’t look this way, that I should be doing something to make it whole again. Nervous excitement waxed in time with the waning of the solar crescent, which grew thinner with each minute as the moon’s silhouette sank ever deeper into the sun. As the last of the solar disk threatened to slip behind the moon, I panicked, alternating between eclipse glasses and solar binoculars, unsure which would provide the best experience. The binoculars won.

And then, in a moment I had envisioned for years, the final shred of the solar disk created a magnificent diamond ring flare effect on the trailing edge of the lunar disk, and totality began. With my own eyes, I saw the sun’s atmosphere reach out from behind the moon’s silhouette, a black star shining in a false twilight that stretched twenty-five miles above the horizon. The sight stroked a primal part of my psyche that told me it was all wrong, like watching a leviathan pass just beneath the surface in a fathomless ocean. To my senses, the eclipsed sun seemed to fill the sky itself. Venus was visible gleaming star-like and brilliant above, but the impossible sun was our only focus. I grabbed my unfiltered binoculars for a closer look, something that can only be done when the sun’s photosphere is completely masked by the moon, and witnessed a bright prominence glowing to the left of the lunar disk, outshining the corona that surrounded the natural satellite. One minute and thirty-seven seconds of totality, utterly unique, never to be repeated in exactly the same way again.

As the sun emerged from behind the moon, the spell was broken, and I turned my eyes back to my camera, which had decided to stop talking to my phone at some point during totality. Ten minutes of berating the inanimate object later, the connection was restored, and my views of totality were on their way to our solar eclipse live blog. Charles and the team had been diligently capturing data on the sun’s atmosphere throughout totality while streaming live views to NASA. It was, to me, a shining example of citizen science, which had brought family, friends, locals, and students together as one to enjoy one of the most spectacular sights that our solar system has to offer. The partially eclipsed sun set over the western horizon as Charles accepted the cheers of the DEB group. Our last night in Valoria la Buena was spent among newfound friends, discussing music, love, and coffee, all while enjoying a little rum. My return journey was a malaise of delayed trains, a cancelled flight, and a sea of unfamiliar faces. But none of that mattered. I was dwelling on that magnificent black sun at the moment of totality, of the unnatural twilight, and of the people I met along the way. I was dwelling on the knowledge that I had finally experienced something that had eluded me for thirty-seven years, and that I would carry with me for the rest of my life.