The King of Totality
A veteran astronomer describes more than 60 years’ worth of memories from inside the moon’s shadow.
Donald Liebenberg remembers clearly his first total solar eclipse.
It was 1954, and he was a physics major at the University of Wisconsin. Liebenberg and his professors drove a station wagon up a hill in a small town south of Lake Superior and set up their instruments under a clear morning sky. Black flies buzzed around them in the June heat. The moon began its slow creep across the sun, inching further and further until it blocked the light and cast its shadow on Earth. For about a minute, their little spot on the globe was blanketed in darkness.
Liebenberg remembers his second total solar eclipse, on the island
