The 105-year-old Texas grandfather and former airplane designer will observe his 13th total solar eclipse on Monday after a lifetime of tracking astronomical phenomena.
Laverne Biser has been an eclipse chaser since 1963, packing his wife and three children into his station wagon and driving nearly 3,000 miles from the Lone Star State to Maine to observe the first solar eclipse. I drove.
“That one solar eclipse was all it took,” said Visser, then 45. told the Washington Post last week. “I saw one, but I had to see them all. I was hooked.
Since that day, he has traveled around the world to see as many solar eclipses as possible.
He and his late wife traveled to places like Brazil, the Black Sea, and the Virgin Islands in search of the best vantage points of various solar eclipses.
The last time I saw it with my wife, Marion, who passed away last year at the age of 97, was in 2017.
“It was a good one,” he said. he told Fox 4 Dallas..
Mr. Visser’s love of astronomy grew out of his interest in high school science classes as a teenager in rural Ohio in the 1930s. There, the stars and moon shone brightly over the family’s farmland.
He earned a degree in mechanical engineering from Ohio State University and went on to a career designing airplanes at General Dynamics near Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth.
All the while, Visser was building his own telescope and planning trips to various states and countries where the total solar eclipse would be best viewed.
His daughter, Carol Visser Barlow, 76, told The Washington Post that her family’s road trips for solar eclipses helped them visit 49 states by the time she graduated from high school.
Ms Barlow, who is hosting her father’s 13th solar eclipse, said his father’s love of unusual glasses also influenced the wedding date.
“I told my parents two potential wedding dates: June 3rd and July 8th,” she told the paper. “My father said, ‘If you want me to give it to you, you should pick an early date.’ I won’t be here on July 8.” He needed the eclipse to come. ”
This weekend, his centenarian granddaughter will drive him from his home in Fort Worth to Barlow’s home in Plano, where the moon is expected to completely block the sun for another minute.
For eclipse enthusiasts, that minute is “a big deal,” he told the newspaper.
Visser also knows this eclipse is special because he will turn 106 in June, and the next total solar eclipse visible from the United States will be 20 years away.
“I probably won’t be in the next game,” he said. “So we’re hoping the weather cooperates for a long time and we can see this. We’re praying for sunshine.”
He hopes to capture perhaps the last solar eclipse on camera. The walls of his house are lined with photos of more than a dozen solar eclipses he has already witnessed.
Mr. Visser has seen his fair share of total solar eclipses, but he never tires of them.
“This is something really special. There’s nothing like that dark sky in the middle of the day,” he told the paper. “I always feel like a lucky person when I see this. It reminds me that no matter where we are in life, we are all just a small part of the universe.”
