A maximum of two total solar eclipses can occur in any calendar year. Occasionally, a year passes with none at all. 2025 was one of those years, when no total solar eclipse touched the Earth. No crowds gathering beneath racing shadows, no sudden hush falling at midday, no mad scrambling by eclipse enthusiasts to execute travel and logistical plans rehearsed for years. And yet, for those of us who live and breathe eclipses, 2025 was one of the darkest years in memory.
It was, in the truest sense, a year of two eclipses—not of the Sun, but of the heart.
Our community lost Glenn Schneider and Fred Espenak—two men whose work defined half a century of eclipse science, whose names became inseparable from the craft itself. They were very different in personality and path, but together they built the modern foundation of eclipse prediction, observation, and understanding. They inspired a generation of eclipse chasers. They perfected the science of their craft. They shared their genius freely.
For decades, anyone planning an expedition began with a single question: What does Fred’s bulletin say?
From the 1970s through his NASA retirement, Fred Espenak (with his partner, weather guru Jay Anderson) produced the definitive eclipse bulletins—the gold (platinum, osmium, titanium…) standard for accuracy and clarity. His mastery of the predictive arts, his precise canons, and his rigorous yet approachable and educational prose made his work positively indispensable to every serious observer. To know eclipses was to have internalized Fred’s work.
But Fred was never merely a compiler of numbers. He was a teacher who wrote for everyone—the professional astronomer and the backyard enthusiast alike. His secret was generosity; he never withheld knowledge. He shared what he knew, usually wryly spiced with his signature wink and grin of mentorship and understanding. His calm, rigorous yet approachable style invited readers to think as well as to calculate.
The author is honored to have many chances to speak directly with Fred. At a conference in St. Louis in 2016, I asked him how he managed such enormous computational undertakings. Forget about all the time involved; how did he DO all the things he did? He smiled and said simply, “The formulas are all there—you just have to use them.”
That sentence became a compass for me. Fred made the mathematics I already loved feel like an open door instead of a locked gate. His bulletins, books, and talks gave the eclipse community its language and its confidence. His inspiration led me to spend most of my adult life learning and using all those formulas he had so deftly cleared the path for.
After retiring from NASA, Fred devoted himself entirely to public education and outreach, transforming his lifelong passion into a second career of authorship and mentorship. From his home in Arizona, he produced an extraordinary series of eclipse books, maps, and observing guides—most notably those for the 2017 and 2024 total solar eclipses—which became standard references for both amateur and professional observers worldwide. Even as his health became a primary focus for him after a difficult diagnosis in 2020, Fred continued to correspond warmly with fellow umbraphiles, publishing new material and encouraging others to carry the torch. Few knew the extent of his illness until April 16, 2025, when he shared a final, moving farewell message on Facebook—his characteristic humility and gratitude shining through to the very end.
It would not be inappropriate to share excerpts from that message, as it tells the story of a man we all knew as a scientist, but who, at the end of the day, was a supremely nice guy:
“Dear Friends, I want to share some sad news. …My health has rapidly deteriorated…. Unfortunately, it has progressed too far for a transplant. I expect to be placed into hospice care… But I cannot complain. I have had a marvelous life of eclipses, astronomy, a NASA career, and my wonderful wife Pat, the greatest love of my life.
I wish those I leave behind many more years of clear eclipses and awe for the heavens.
Farewell to all of you,
Fred”
And Godspeed to you as well, Fred. Thank you for everything. Your work will never be replaced. You will always be, for all of us, “Mr. Eclipse.”
In memory of "Mr. Eclipse", Fred Espenak (January 19, 1952 – June 1, 2025)
Glenn Schneider’s first eclipse was March 7, 1970. He was thirteen, armed with months of homemade plans, tripods, cameras and film. He was ready to document this adventure! Later he’d laugh about it during his talks, showing a completely black slide titled My First Eclipse Photo. “This was my first eclipse photo, because when totality started,” he’d say, “I just stood there. Mouth hanging open, thumb unable to press my cable release. I couldn’t do anything but just stare. Much too late, I realized that I would only be imaging this eclipse retinally.” From that moment, he dedicated his life to making sure no one ever had to miss that moment again.
Beyond eclipses, Glenn built an extraordinary scientific legacy in observational astronomy and instrumentation. At the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory, he served for decades as an expert in high-contrast imaging and adaptive optics, specializing in the study of circumstellar disks, brown dwarfs, and the faint companions of bright stars. He was the principal investigator and instrument scientist for the NICMOS coronagraph aboard the Hubble Space Telescope, and one of the world’s leading authorities on space-based coronagraphy—the art of revealing hidden light by suppressing glare (using instruments far more sophisticated than the patented “thumb coronagraph” he so fondly demonstrated at every opportunity!).
His contributions reached far beyond eclipse chasing. Glenn helped pioneer the techniques that later enabled direct imaging of exoplanets and detailed observations of debris disks around other stars, connecting the geometry of light suppression to the geometry of shadow itself. In that sense, his non-eclipse work was never separate from his eclipse passion—it was the same pursuit on a cosmic scale. Whether mapping a disk of dust light-years away or tracing the Moon’s shadow racing across Earth, Glenn’s mastery of the faint and the fleeting remained constant: to make visible what most people will never see, and to teach others how to see it for themselves.
But his passion remained eclipses. In the 1970s, he wrote programs that literally plugged into the navigational arrays of large commercial aircraft (think DC10), to guide these aircraft on optimal flight paths into totality. Those efforts evolved into Umbraphile, the software that until 2019 defined airborne eclipse intercepts.
The author first used Umbraphile for the 1999 eclipse in Turkey—which just happened to be my thirty-sixth birthday. (I had anticipated this eclipse from the age of 10, wondering if I’d still be interested in eclipses at such an old age!) I had modified the use of the program slightly, having built an electrical contraption to fire the shutters of multiple cameras simultaneously—and the results were amazing! Months of planning yielded hundreds of photos, with me able to simply watch the eclipse and burn the image of the beautiful “Sunflower Eclipse” into memory. When I wrote to Glenn about my results, he responded with warmth and curiosity. He invited me to join his 2001 eclipse expedition to Zambia, beginning a correspondence, collaboration, and friendship built on shared precision and shared wonder.
In 2008 we flew together out of Düsseldorf to chase the Arctic eclipse from the skies. I mounted synchronized cameras on both sides of the aircraft, and created a time lapse of the shadow overtaking our aircraft from behind. Glenn quickly combined the sequenced images into a film of the Moon’s shadow sweeping across the clouds—a gift, I said, “that belongs to everyone.”
In 2013, I shared one of the most amazing days of my life with Glenn and the rest of our entourage. That story is for another day, but suffice it to say that the experience was amazing. Without Glenn’s precise calculations, done on the fly in real time in a remote Kenyan National Park in the middle of a biblical dust storm, the eclipse experience would have been shattered for all of us.
Glenn’s formal proposal to Alaska Airlines in 2015 helped solidify Joe Rao’s plans to allow a regularly scheduled flight to intercept the umbra, and bring totality to hundreds of (mostly unsuspecting) passengers. The author was privileged to be on that flight from Anchorage to Honolulu on March 8, 2016.
By 2019 we were preparing a new airborne experiment for the Easter Island eclipse—rotating-polarizer imagery of the solar corona, to gather data that would have complemented Shadia Habbal’s research into the motion of highly ionized coronal particles. My daughter, then a planetary-science student, helped design and test the system for months leading up to our trip. Glenn guided every step with advice, suggestions, encouragement and validation. The eclipse was to fall on my daughter’s twenty-first birthday, and I had promised her this eclipse since she was six!
The day before departure, I was hospitalized unexpectedly. Surgery saved my life but cost us the flight, the trip, the experiment, and the eclipse. I was devastated. But thankfully, Glenn used our unoccupied row on the plane for extra gear, and carried on with his work. I will never stop feeling the loss of that shared moment—but our project’s spirit lived on through him.
Not long after, Glenn’s health began to falter. He was diagnosed with transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE)—a cruel twist of fate, for in eclipse circles those same initials stand for nothing other than Total Solar Eclipse. The illness progressed slowly and mercilessly. By 2022 his responses to email grew brief, then stopped abruptly. We lost him little by little, watching the brightest mind in our community fade behind a veil no one could lift. His family was with him, caring for him the best they could. In a cruel twist of irony, I was told that on April 8, 2024, he casually asked a friend, “Isn’t there supposed to be an eclipse today?”
Glenn passed away on February 5, 2025.
In memory of Dr. Glenn Schneider (October 12, 1955 – February 5, 2025)
Two men who turned mathematics into magic, and shadows into light.
Two men, two paths, two losses within a single season. For the rest of us, the sky itself seemed dimmer.
Their deaths left a silence no conference or bulletin could fill. Emails went unanswered; familiar names disappeared from distribution lists; the hum of shared planning faded. These weren’t just scientists—they were the gravitational centers of a community held together by curiosity and respect.
Glenn and Fred both gave us direction: how to find the shadow, how to predict and intercept it with mathematical grace, how to describe that pursuit so anyone could follow. Together, they embodied the precision and the poetry of eclipse science.
2025 will be remembered as a year without totality, but also as a year we learned what darkness truly is.
And yet, light remains. Every simulation, every map, every line of code that traces the Moon’s path is marked with these giant fingerprints. When we plan our next expeditions—when we set coordinates, check elements, verify ΔT—we are still working in their shadow, guided by their light. Following their path.
Fred Espenak taught us to chase the shadow. Glenn Schneider taught us to understand it.
The Sun will rise again, and with it, new minds will take up the work of these two giants. But for those of us who knew and loved them, 2025 will always be the year of two eclipses—the kind that darken the skies within us.