Professor Frank Close, Emeritus Fellow in Physics at Exeter College, has made a special study of eclipses, including the total solar eclipse which affected large parts of the United States in late August 2017. Professor Close, who observed the totality of that eclipse in Wyoming, has investigated not only the science of eclipses but also the ways in which they have affected humans over time, right up to the present day.

This year Frank Close published a book on the subject, timed to coincide with the solar eclipse, entitled Eclipse: Journeys to the Dark Side of the Moon. In the book Frank Close analyses why eclipses happen, reveals their role in history, literature and myth, and focuses on eclipse chasers, who travel with ecstatic fervour to some of the most inaccessible places on the globe to be present at the moment of totality. The book also includes the author’s quest to solve a 3000-year-old mystery: how did the moon move backwards during a total solar eclipse, as claimed in the Book of Joshua?