This TED Talk features journalist, author, and broadcaster, David Barron, recorded live at TEDx Mile High 2017.

Before I get to the bulk of what I have to say, I feel compelled just to mention a couple of things about myself.

I am not some mystical, spiritual sort of person.

I'm a science writer. I studied physics in college. I used to be a science correspondent for NPR.

Okay, that's it. In the course of working on a story for NPR,

I got some advice from an astronomer that challenged my outlook and frankly changed my life.

You see, the story was about an eclipse, a partial solar eclipse

that was set across the country in May of 1994. And the astronomer, I interviewed him,

and he explained what was going to happen and how to view it. But he emphasized that as interesting

as a partial solar eclipse is, a much rarer total solar eclipse is completely different.

In a total eclipse, for all of two or three minutes,

the moon completely blocks the face of the sun,

creating what he described as the most awe-inspiring spectacle in all of nature.

And so the advice he gave me was this.

Before you die, he said, you owe it to yourself to experience a total solar eclipse.

Well, honestly, I felt a little uncomfortable hearing that from someone I didn't know very well.

It felt sort of intimate.

But it got my attention, and so I did some research. Now, the thing about total eclipses is, if you wait for one

to come to you, you're going to be waiting a long time. Any given point on Earth experiences a total eclipse about once every 400 years.

But if you're willing to travel, you don't have to wait that long.

And so I learned that a few years later, in 1998, a total eclipse was going to cross the Caribbean.

Now, a total eclipse is visible only along a narrow path, about 100 miles wide,

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