Astronomer’s excitement over a solar eclipse is contagious

If you spend all of your time studying the stars, and you get the rare chance of seeing a total solar eclipse from an airplane, you may sound something like this thrilled astronomer.

That contagious excitement comes from astronomer Mike Kentrianakis. Flying somewhere between Honolulu and Anchorage, Alaska Airlines Flight 870 was packed with “eclipse chasers” hoping to see the first total eclipse in about a year, according to a blog post on the Alaska Airlines website.

The airline delayed that flight on purpose by 25 minutes at the request of Joe Rao, associate astronomer at New York’s Hayden Planetarium (which is famously run by Neil DeGrasse Tyson), in order to ensure that the scientists would not miss their window to see the eclipse. Read more…