Location: '34 South' Young Hilltops LGA, Australia
Posts: 1,473
Sad news - Eclipse legend Fred Espenak
Very sad news came through today from eclipse chasing legend, Fred Espenak, on the solar eclipse mailing list.
"Dear Friends.
I want to share some sad news.
I was diagnosed with Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF) five years ago. I did not have any significant symptoms until last year. That changed dramatically in 2025 and my health has rapidly deteriorated.
I have spent the last two weeks in a Phoenix hospital undergoing exhaustive testing to determine whether I am a candidate for a lung transplant. Unfortunately, my IPF has progressed too far for a transplant.
I expect to be placed into hospice care tomorrow and will probably be gone within a few days or less.
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"
Very sad news came through in mid-April in the form of a farewell message from eclipse chasing legend, Fred Espenak. By the time this is printed, we will have lost another legendary eclipse chaser from our realm.
Fred became hooked when, as a high school senior, he observed his first solar eclipse on 7 March 1970. His parents let him take the family car some 600 miles south to a location near near Windsor North Carolina not far from Kittyhawk. He has observed 31 total and 9 annular eclipses across 25 countries in 55 years of eclipse chasing.
Fred worked at or for NASA for many decades, initially with Computer Sciences Corp., a major contractor with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, later directly as a NASA employee. Fred was a veritable "rocket scientist." He was one of the people who computed trajectories for planetary exploration space probes among other things at the Goddard Space Flight Centre if my memory is correct. In his "spare time," he pursued an interest in eclipse chasing and eclipse circumstance computation.
In 1991, Fred co-authored a seminal book, Totality: Eclipses of the Sun, by Mark Littmann, Fred Espenak, Ken Wilcox which was reprinted in multiple editions over the next 20 years.
[See attached photo]
I recall using Fetch, an ftp application, in the early 1990's to download a file set of circumstances and maps from a NASA cache that Fred had made available for the 1994 total eclipse in South America. It was very slow and clunky in those early years of the internet.
NASA supported his endeavours and for many decades, Fred would produce a NASA Technical Publication for each eclipse. Once you had made observations of two total solar eclipses, you could request to be placed on the international mailing list and these wonderful publications would magically arrive in your mailbox about 6-12 months before the upcoming eclipse.
[See attached photo]
NASA eventually withdrew support from the publication of eclipse bulletins. Before doing that, they funded the production of 5 millennium catalogues and canon's of solar and lunar eclipses. In retirement, Fred has been involved in a series of bespoke self published books and guides about each eclipse.
[See attached photo]
Going back, the first time I corresponded directly with Fred was some months prior to the 1999 annular eclipse in Western Australia. This was a couple of years before digital mapping became widely available. The annular eclipse path was geographically narrow because the obscuration was 99.16%. I wrote to Fred to inform him that I had access to a large scale 1:250K topographic map of the region and large format scanner available. If he would generate a set of higher resolution path coordinates for the Western Australia coast, I would plot them on the 1:250K topo map, scan and return it to him for distribution via the NASA website. The web published global coordinates only had one path point on my map. Fred obliged, I plotted and scanned and Fred uploaded that map to the NASA eclipse site. By the next eclipse, the world digital maps were available and a few years after that, Google Earth and Google Maps exploded into our collective consciousness and all eclipse mapping transferred to Google overlays.
In 2003, the IAU named near Earth asteroid (14120) Espenak after Fred. Fred has, been a tour leader of many eclipse expeditions in partnership with a commercial travel company for many years, has spoken at many conferences, and authored a feature preview article about almost every solar eclipse in Sky And Telescope plus articles on eclipse photography for the past 30 or more years.
I wish Fred peace and comfort during his final days and a box seat in the celestial eclipse chasers arena for all eternity.
Thanks for the heads up Joe..Very sad news indeed.
Fred's images provided me with the inspiration for my more recent eclipse images...you can see further from the shoulders of giants....and as for the "when and where" his calculations were essential for many an eclipse chaser.
Location: '34 South' Young Hilltops LGA, Australia
Posts: 1,473
Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter Ward
Thanks for the heads up Joe..Very sad news indeed.
Fred's images provided me with the inspiration for my more recent eclipse images...you can see further from the shoulders of giants....and as for the "when and where" his calculations were essential for many an eclipse chaser.
He will be sorely missed.
Hi Peter,
In the past 2.5 years, we've lost 3 legends, Pasachoff in 2022, Glenn Schneider 2 months ago and now Fred.
I guess we're all getting closer by the day to catching the last bus.
