Fred Espenak, Astrophysicist Known as Mr. Eclipse, Dies at 73
The cause was idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, said his wife, Patricia Totten Espenak, known as Ms. Eclipse. The Espenaks met during a solar eclipse in India and danced to Bonnie Tyler's ballad 'Total Eclipse of the Heart' at their wedding.
During five decades of chasing eclipses, Mr. Espenak wrote several books about them, notably 'Five Millennium Canon of Solar Eclipses' (2006), a two-volume, 742-page treatise written with the Belgian meteorologist Jean Meeus; operated four websites devoted to celestial statistics, including MrEclipse.com; and witnessed 52 solar eclipses, 31 of which were total.
'When you see a total eclipse, you will realize for the first time what the meaning of awesome is,' Mr. Espenak told Time magazine in 2017. 'Everything else is mundane.'
Mr. Espenak saw his first total eclipse in 1970 as a nerdy teenager, driving 600 miles from his home on Staten Island to a grassy field behind a motel in North Carolina.
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