Totality

Mark Littmann holds an endowed professorship in science writing at the University of Tennessee, where he teaches both science writing and astronomy. He has written several popular astronomy books, including Planets Beyond: Discovering the Outer Solar System, which won the Science Writing Award of the American Institute of Physics; and Comet Halley: Once in a Lifetime (with Don Yeomans), which won the Elliott Montroll Special Award of the New York Academy of Sciences. His most recent book is The Heavens on Fire: The Great Leonid Meteor Storms. He has helped to lead solar eclipse expeditions.


Fred Espenak is the most widely recognized name in solar eclipses. He is an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, where he founded and runs the NASA Eclipse Home Page <>, the most consulted website for eclipse information for people around the globe. Two years before each total solar eclipse he issues a NASA bulletin of technical information, maps, weather data and commentary. Espenak also writes regularly on eclipses for Sky & Telescope and is one of the best known of eclipse photographers. He leads expeditions for every total solar eclipse wherever it is in the world and has done so for more than 35 years. In 2003, the International Astronomical Union honored Espenak and his eclipse work by naming asteroid 14120 after him.


The late Ken Willcox was a polymer chemist for Phillips Petroleum with a lifetime passion for astronomy. A frequent speaker at astronomical meetings, he also taught physics and astronomy classes at Bartlesville Wesleyan College. In 1988, Willcox was elected President of the Astronomical League and he also served on the board of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Willcox witnessed his first total eclipse of the Sun in 1979. That event inspired him to collaborate with Mark Littmann on a comprehensive guide to eclipses in preparation for the great total eclipse of 1991. The resulting book, Totality: Eclipses of the Sun, was hailed as the best popular reference on the subject ever published. Littmann and Willcox asked Espenak to join them in expanding and updating the second edition of Totality which was published by Oxford University Press in May 1999. Unfortunately, Willcox lost his fight to bone cancer before he could see the second edition in print.