On April 8, 2024, the Great North American Solar Eclipse will cross the country, plunging a 124-mile-wide swath of land stretching from Mexico to Canada into night-like darkness.

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First, the crowds gather, spreading out picnic blankets, setting up lawn chairs and stringing up hammocks. There's a social, even jovial atmosphere until the sunlight begins to dim, and an unnerving shadow seeps across the entire landscape like a rising tide. The chatter quiets as eyes lift to the sky. And finally, it happens — the sun is consumed entirely by a pitch-black disk, nighttime arrives in the middle of the day, and everyone gasps then cheers.

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The spectacle of a total solar eclipse is an awe-inspiring moment, one that many sky watchers travel the world to witness. In 2017, the United States experienced its first total solar eclipse in nearly 40 years, with an impressive 88% of adults in the country turning out to view the show.  But because the shadow of the moon is quite small when projected onto the Earth, only a tiny fraction of the planet experiences any given eclipse. On average, a specific location will only experience a total solar eclipse roughly every 375 years.