Totality: The Great American Eclipses of 2017 and 2024

Totality: The Great American Eclipses is a complete guide to the most stunning of celestial sights, total eclipses of the Sun. It focuses on the eclipses of August 21, 2017 and April 8, 2024 that pass across the United States. The U.S. mainland has not experienced a total solar eclipse since 1979. This book provides information, photographs, and illustrations to help the public understand and safely enjoy all aspects of these eclipses including how to observe a total eclipse of the Sun, how to photograph and video record an eclipse, why solar eclipses happen, and more.

Mark Littmann has written several popular books about astronomy. Planets Beyond: Discovering the Outer Solar System won the Science Writing Award of the American Institute of Physics. Planet Halley: Once in a Lifetime (Donald K Yeomans, co-author) won the Elliott Montroll Special Award of the New York Academy of Sciences. Reviewers described The Heavens on Fire: The Great Leonid Meteor Storms as a "unique achievement," "altogether satisfying," and "a compelling read."

Mark holds an endowed professorship, the Hill Chair of Excellence in Science Writing, at the University of Tennessee where he teaches three different courses in writing about science, technology, medicine, and the environment. He has helped lead expeditions to Canada, Hawaii, Bolivia, Aruba, and Turkey to observe total eclipses.


Fred Espenak is the most widely recognized name in solar eclipses. He is an astrophysicist emeritus at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, where he founded and runs the NASA Eclipse Home Page «http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse.html», the most consulted website for eclipse information around the globe. His Five Millennium Canons of solar and lunar eclipses are seminal works for researchers, archaeologists, and historians.

Fred writes regularly on eclipses for Sky & Telescope and is probably the best known of all eclipse photographers. He leads expeditions for every total solar eclipse 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.