“The sky starts to get cool and dark a couple minutes before totality. And all of your instincts, all of a sudden, start to freak out. Something’s going wrong . . . . There’s this deep basic panic that sets in as the whole world changes in a way it’s not supposed to. All of a sudden it feels like you’re standing on another planet,” recounts Michelle Thaller, a NASA astronomer who saw her first eclipse while visiting Egypt in 2006.