🔒Heaven can’t wait: Confessions of an eclipse-chaser

When Maryann Ott started chasing the wonders of the sky, she never thought she'd wind up in the shadow of a perfect path.

Ott is managing director of the NewAlliance Foundation, an independent New Haven foundation that provides financial support to charitable organizations throughout the region and state.

Benefactress by day, globetrotting eclipse-chaser by night (well, technically day) Ott has traveled to more than a dozen locations worldwide to capture solar eclipses, solely with her own eyes.

Why solar eclipses? “When I'm standing in the shadow of the moon, all feels right with the world,” says Ott.

Eclipse chasing grew from Ott's childhood love for astronomy. Her father used to take her out into their backyard to teach her the constellations as they scoured the nighttime sky.

As she grew up, instead of outgrowing her youthful obsession, Ott allowed it to take wing. When she graduated from college (Southern Connecticut State University, with a degree in social work), her father gave her a telescope. She carried that passion (and her telescope) into her early 40s, when she finally saw her first eclipse: in a soccer field in Zambia, Africa in 2001.

“What I thought was going to be a onetime astronomical experience turned into this passion,” says Ott. Since that long-ago excursion has witnessed every kind of solar eclipse there is, from perches on nearly every continent.

Ott says eclipses are spiritual for her, yet also allow her to feel a “visceral connection to nature.” And so many expressions of nature: She's been gorilla and chimpanzee trekking, traveled across the Mongolian steppe, and journeyed across the Sahara Desert (which took about nine days) traveling with the Tuareg people (nomadic inhabitants of that desert).

The longest solar eclipse Ott has seen lasted 6 minutes and 38 seconds (7 minutes is the longest possible). This was in July 2009 on an eclipse “cruise” to the East China Sea.

But longer isn’t necessarily better: She once traveled to Uganda to witness a 9-second eclipse. Short, but sweet.

Ott describes how eclipses have offered her the opportunity to travel to parts of the world she would never otherwise dream of visiting, enriching her with priceless perspectives (and the occasional memento).

Ott travels with a network of friends from all over the country she's met along the way; her very first experience having been with an organized group who prepared her for succeeding journeys. She aims to catch every single solar eclipse she can (if the stars and planets align, so to speak, about every other year).

“I can look into the future and see where all the eclipses are to be...” says Ott. “The visible path is very defined.”

The trajectory of Ott’s life didn't always have such a visible path. She worked a slew of jobs before finding herself in New Haven, which became and has remained home. It was when she took her current position some 16 years ago that she says became the evident destination of the journey of finding herself.

A whole new world opened up. Ott chased eclipses, but she found herself — at home, at peace.

At least until the next celestial convergence. That will take place on Dec. 14 of this year, and Ott will be in southern Chile to bask in all its penumbral splendor. “I’ll be in Villarrica,” she says, “after which I’m hiking in Patagonia.”

At this point, the odds seem as remote as her itinerary that Ott will outgrow what began as a girl’s innocent idyll. “It'll be an obsession for the rest of my life,” she allows.

“I really feel that eclipses are a true gift of the universe.”