On a scorching July afternoon in 1878, at the dawn of the Gilded Age, the moon’s shadow descended on the American West, darkening skies from the Montana Territory to Texas. This rare celestial event—a total solar eclipse—offered a priceless opportunity to solve some of the solar system’s most enduring riddles, and it prompted a clutch of enterprising scientists to brave the frontier in a grueling race to the Rocky Mountains.

Drawing from his 2017 book American Eclipse, science journalist David Baron, long fascinated by eclipses, provides an overview of this epic tale of ambition, failure, and glory with a multimedia presentation that reveals as much about the historical trajectory of a striving young nation as it does about the scant three minutes when the blue sky blackened and stars appeared in mid-afternoon.

Baron describes the fierce jockeying that came to dominate late 19th-century American astronomy, bringing to life the challenges faced by three of the most determined eclipse chasers who participated in this adventure: James Craig Watson, virtually forgotten in the current century, was in his day a renowned asteroid hunter who fantasized about becoming a Gilded Age Galileo; Vassar astronomer Maria Mitchell, who in an era when women’s education came under fierce attack, fought to demonstrate that science and higher learning were not anathema to femininity; and Thomas Edison, a young inventor and irrepressible showman who braved the wilderness to prove himself to the scientific community.

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