Alumni profile
Full Circle
Umbraphile Evan Zucker ’79 has spent a lifetime documenting solar eclipses
For Evan Zucker ’79, time can’t blot out memories of his first solar eclipse.
“It was 1963, I was 8, and I was playing outside in upstate New York,” Zucker says. “I knew the eclipse was coming, and I could see the crescent sun through broken clouds before my mother ushered me inside. That was my first one, and I’ve been following them ever since.”
Many moons have passed since that first glimpse, but Zucker’s fascination has never waned. Zucker — also known as “Mr. Totality” — is an umbraphile (eclipse chaser) who has spent decades studying, tracking, and photographing the celestial phenomenon.
Now retired, he used his Duke Law degree during various stints in practice, and as a longtime business owner, during a career that also included serving as an Air Force fighter pilot and creating software programs.
“While I did practice law a little, I mostly did other things. I get bored every few years,” Zucker explains.
Taking to the skies
In many ways, it is the laws of nature — not the laws of man — that have defined Zucker’s life’s trajectory. From childhood, he displayed an uncommon interest in astronomy, riding the subway alone on weekends from his family’s home in Queens to the original Hayden Planetarium on New York’s Upper West Side. When he was 14, Zucker persuaded a high school teacher to drive him and a friend to Virginia to see the March 7, 1970, eclipse — his first full viewing. At 17, he and friends chartered a bus to Quebec for his second.
Zucker developed his interests in photography and writing as an undergraduate at the University of Rochester. As a freshman, he traveled to Washington and wangled a press pass to the July 1973 Senate Watergate hearings, publishing several photos in the campus newspaper that earned him a national collegiate photojournalism award.
He pursued those interests at Duke Law, serving as executive editor of the Duke Law Journal. While his studies prevented him from viewing the Feb. 21, 1979, total solar eclipse during his 3L year, he wrote about his 1970 eclipse sighting for the campus magazine Aeolus:
“Totality! I couldn’t believe it. Just as in the pictures, but infinitely better. The hush of nature’s spectacle was interrupted by the incessant clicking of camera shutters and I murmured ‘Oh wow. Oh wow.’ … One does not just see or watch a total eclipse, one experiences it, and words are simply inadequate to describe the experience.”
Following graduation, Zucker embarked on a civil litigation career in San Diego that was interrupted when he saw the televised landing of the space shuttle Columbia and set out to become a pilot, squeaking under the Air Force’s enlistment age cutoff.
“There were these little white fighter jets escorting the shuttle, and I thought to myself, ‘That looks interesting. I think I might like to do that,’” Zucker recalls.
“Not many lawyers become fighter pilots, but by the end of that week I had begun the application process, and the following spring I told my firm I was out.”
Zucker finished second in his class as a weapon systems officer and deployed to Naval Air Station Keflavik, Iceland, doing what he calls “real flying” in an F-4E Phantom II on a mission to identify, escort, and, if necessary, take down Soviet bombers in its airspace. He also served as the squadron’s camera officer and public affairs officer.
He then flew the F-4G Wild Weasel fighter jet as an electronic warfare officer based at Spangdahlem Air Base in West Germany, training to suppress a possible Soviet invasion of western Europe.
In all, Zucker spent six years in the Air Force. After his discharge, he dipped back into law for a few years at a San Diego firm, then launched a civil litigation practice with a partner. Again, he didn’t linger in practice very long. Zucker had written and sold two astronomy programs after leaving the Air Force, and in 1995 he incorporated his company as Totality Software and sold debt collection software to law firms for the next 25 years until retiring in December 2019.
“The most spectacular natural sight”
Retiring did leave him time to pursue travel, birding, and nature photography, avocations he shares with his wife, physician Paula Eisenhart. The couple made a trip to Antarctica in early 2020, just before they were temporarily grounded by the COVID-19 pandemic. Eisenhart worked through the first year of the pandemic before retiring in 2021.
Now back on the road and in the air, the couple are indulging their interests in such far-flung locations as Alaska, Iceland, the Falkland Islands, Key West, and Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. This spring, they embarked on a cross-country road trip from their California home to eastern Canada with an SUV packed with camera and electronic equipment. Their mission: to capture the total solar eclipse of April 8, 2024, the tenth of Zucker’s life and his second in Quebec.
After scouting locations for two days they set up their gear in a farm field near Sherbrooke, Quebec, and captured stunning images of the eclipse — “the most spectacular natural sight you can see on Earth” — as it reached totality at 3:28 p.m. Sharing the experience with others, Zucker notes, is part of what makes an eclipse so meaningful, and they were joined by a small group of locals from the French-speaking province.
By the time they returned to California, Zucker and Eisenhart had covered 6,500 miles, 22 states and two provinces, encountering tornadoes and hailstorms along the way. And they were already planning a trip to Spain for the next total solar eclipse on August 12, 2026.
Just what is it about an eclipse that accounts for his lifelong obsession? For Zucker, it’s a rhetorical question.
“When you see one, you’ll know,” he says. “The real question is ‘When is the next one?’” — Hayley Foran
