In 1999, Michelle Nichols saw her first total solar eclipse on a cruise in the Black Sea. It would be many years before she witnessed another one during a visit to southern Illinois in 2017.

"It seemed so far in the future," she said.

Now, Nichols, an astronomer, educator and the director of public observing at the Adler Planetarium, is planning to return to Carbondale, Illinois, where the moon will completely block out the sun for more than four minutes on April 8. It is the second time in seven years that southern Illinois has been in the path of totality, or the moon's shadow.

Rarely do these celestial bodies line up perfectly with the earth to create a total eclipse. It's even rarer for a total eclipse to plunge the same region into darkness in less than a decade.

"Any given location on Earth will see an actual, total solar eclipse on average every 375 years," Nichols said. "So you have to be at the right place, at the right time."

While Chicago is not in the path of totality again this year, the area will experience a partial eclipse, and the sky will darken.

Humans have long dreamed of setting foot on the moon and other planetary bodies such as Mars. Since the 1960s, space travelers have donned suits designed to protect them from the vacuum of space and stepped out into the unknown.

However, the Polaris Dawn mission, which is to include the first spacewalk organized by a private company, has been delayed. This is due to complications with the design and development of a suitable spacesuit.

Moon suits are also one of the key elements of NASA's Artemis lunar program that have yet to be delivered. A report released in November 2023 said that the contractor making the suits is having to revisit aspects of the design provided by NASA, which could introduce delays.

Yet the first spacewalk, by the Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, took place in 1965. Later, 12 NASA astronauts would walk on the lunar surface, between 1969 and 1972, using technology that would be eclipsed by today's smartphones.