CINCINNATI — The upcoming eclipse already has families making travel plans, but one astronomer says he’s been eclipse traveling for decades.

There’s no place Dean Regas won’t go to get a front-row seat to something he says is magical. 

“Lake Tahoe, and Hawaii, and Arizona and Greece,” said Regas. 

“The sky turns such an eerie color and when the sun completely disappears, it’s just magical and it’s a little frightening too and a few minutes later the sun comes out and it’s like you wake up from a dream,” said Regas. 

Armed with a telescope and filter, he’s been chasing eclipse sightings for more than two decades.

“My first lunar eclipses goes back to the 90s but my first solar eclipse travel I did was 1999 when I went to Maine to see a partial solar eclipse, and I only got a glimpse of it before the clouds got it, and it was so frustrating because it was tantalizingly close but I only got to see one glimpse of it,” said Regas. 

From then on, he was hooked. He became an astronomer and is always searching for the best spot to see space, but he says it wasn’t exactly supposed to happen that way.

“I taught history for a short period of time in classrooms and then I found this later on in life as my passion,” he said. “It was a total accident.”

That accident took him across the globe and right back into the classroom. He talks to kids about the sun and the moon, wrote a book about it, and his eclipse travels led him right back to Ohio.

The next eclipse he’ll be able to see close to home on April 8th but he said he’s already planning for the next eclipse trip.

“Egypt’s coming up in a few years and New Zealand, or Japan,” said Regas. 

For more information and to see where Regas will be next, click here.