OK, so I'm doing this just because I like the idea of having an event invitation float around on facebook for 7 years. However, seeing a total eclipse is apparently one of those must-do-at-least-once-in-your-life sorts of activities. Given that the Earth is mostly water and total eclipses are rare, you're very lucky if you don't have to go to Tuvalu or some other backwater to see it.
The last total eclipse in the continental US was before I was born... the next one won't be till I'm middle-aged.
Here's what someone who's seen one says about it:
We cannot stress this enough - if you're in the path, you see what is perhaps one of the most phenomenal sights that human eyes can convey to a brain! If you're not in the path, even by only a mile or so (!!!!!), you will come away wondering what in the heck we even bothered to make this site for! And you will have completely missed the whole show. People fly to the remotest deserts, jungles, islands -- frozen, desolate, and mosquito-infested places - just to be in the path of a total eclipse. So please, please, please: walk, run, fly, drive, hike, roll, thumb, or cycle yourself into the path on eclipse day, and you will not regret it! Miss it, and you'll have to wait till the next one (in 2024). Take it from us - do not think that you're "close enough" to the path to see something cool. Look at the maps, and if where you are isn't in the dark band (and as close to the blue centerline as possible), please please get yourself there by whatever means are necessary! Even if it's 300 miles or more! People will come from all over the world to see this grand spectacle, and you already live right here! You will thank us thousands of times over for having talked you into it, and you will thank whatever it is you believe in that you got to see what you saw while standing in the shadow.
Please take it from me - I've kissed the Blarney Stone, and seen the Grand Canyon, Victoria Falls, Ayers Rock, the Berlin Wall, the Great Wall, the Taj Mahal, the West Edmonton Mall, the Pyramids in Egypt, the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, Stonehenge, the giant Sequoia Trees, Death Valley, the Panama Canal, Mt. Kilimanjaro, Meteor Crater, Yellowstone, the North Pole, the Midnight Sun over the Arctic Ocean, Shakespeare's grave, the Alps in Switzerland, the Grand Mosque in Istanbul, the geysers in Iceland, the Sydney Opera House, the Eiffel tower, the CN tower, Sydney Tower, Shanghai Tower, the Ring at Bayreuth and the Met, the Berlin Philharmonic, and my kids being born -- and I'm not kidding: A total eclipse is a spectacle to rival them all!
Learn more here:
http://www.eclipse2017.org/ECLIPSE2017_main.HTM
