Since 2017, The Universe in Verse has been celebrating the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry. Details about this year’s eclipse show below.

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Consider the dazzling odds: Out of the billions upon billions of possible combinations, a planet whose sole satellite is exactly 400 times smaller than its star and exactly 400 times closer, so that each time it passes between the two, it covers the face of the star perfectly, thrusting the planet into midday night, into something surreal and sublime.

Randomness seems too small a word for the staggering improbability that is a total solar eclipse. We may call it wonder. We may call it mystery. We may just fall silent before its brutal beauty, the way it presses consciousness against the gun barrel of time. Totality transported Virginia Woolf to “the birth of the world.” Annie Dillard saw in its almost unbearable strangeness a lens on “our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here.” Maria Mitchell, traveling fifteen hundred miles in her Quaker gown to lead an eclipse expedition of the world’s first women astronomers, was stunned by the “inky blackness” and the flowerlike prominences around the Sun’s disc and the silver streamers its corona sent “millions of miles into space” — tendrils of the majesty and mystery of nature, touching for a blink of time the depths of human nature with raw transcendence.

Diagram of a solar eclipse from a 13th-century illuminated manuscript. (New York Public Library Digital Collections.)

On the eve of the 2024 total solar eclipse — the last in North America for twenty years, and the first to sweep so vast a portion of the continent since Maria Mitchell’s day — more than 3,000 people are gathering in person under the starlit skies of Austin’s Waterloo Greenway to reverence Earth’s most sublime communion with the cosmos. (There are still a few tickets left.)

Join us across spacetime via livestream to savor the wonder behind eclipses: the formation of the Moon and the chemistry of the Sun, gravity and relativity, tides and black holes, the discoveries of Kepler and Newton, the stories of the historic eclipse expedition that catapulted Einstein into celebrity and of the fate of the passenger pigeon.

Illustrating the science will be poems old and new, from Walt Whitman and Robinson Jeffers to Hannah Emerson and Rita Dove, performed by a constellation of inspired and inspiring minds, including authors Rebecca Solnit, Roxane Gay, and James Gleick, On Being creator Krista Tippett, Radiolab creator Jad Abumrad, multidisciplinary artist Helga Davis, artist and Design Matters creator Debbie Millman, actor Natascha McElhone, cosmologist and saxophonist Stephon Alexander, poets Marie Howe and Ellen Bass, musicians Joan as Police Woman and David Byrne, and a special surprise guest.

There will be magic and there will be music.

While you watch, something to consider: As a society, we have ceased thinking about how cultural matter appears before us — we take it for granted that we will be informed, entertained, perhaps even enchanted, with nothing required of us in kind. We call this cultural matter by the slur under which Silicon Valley has commodified it: “content” — filler material, insentient to the human endeavor behind it, the myriad invisible labors and sacrifices, collaborations and lonelinesses that make anything of beauty and substance come to life. Every single person you see onstage has donated their time and talent to offer this collaborative gift of perspective and tenderness, and making a free livestream available was a gasp of an expense. Please consider supporting this labor of love with a donation.