Eye on This Guy: As the Solar Eclipse Approaches, Vermont Astronomer and Meteorologist Mark Breen Is Having His Moment in the Sun 

As the moon began its journey across the face of the sun, it gradually blotted out our star's life-giving light and cast the rapt faces of children below in shadow. Just before it completely swallowed the sun, a curved line of tiny, brilliant flecks of light appeared along the moon's outermost edge.

"Oooooooooh!" the kids erupted in awed unison.

A rich and resonant baritone voice cascaded down from the heavens in reply. "What you are seeing now are 'Baily's beads,'" it said. "And if you wait ... just ... one ... second, you'll see ... the 'diamond ring.'"

"Ahhhhhhhhh!" responded the chorus of children.

As the sun disappeared behind the moon, the beads blinked out. Except for one that appeared to grow brighter, as if fueled by the sun's fiery corona encircling the moon's dark sphere. For a shining moment, it did in fact look like a diamond ring. That is, until the last bead of light vanished and the moon completely obscured the sun.

Then, darkness. And silence.

Mostly.

For the 40 or so homeschooled kids fidgeting in their seats in the Lyman Spitzer Jr. Planetarium at the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury, silence was not a strong suit. However, even they were awed into relative quiet while bearing witness to one of the great spectacles of the cosmos: a total solar eclipse.

Or, in this case, a simulation of that spectacle.

For the past several months, director Mark Breen has been fine-tuning the planetarium's eclipse show in advance of the live one coming to Vermont next month. Breen, 63, admits it's still not a perfect representation of the cosmic convergence that millions of North Americans, weather gods willing, will see on April 8. But it's more than enough to capture the imagination, especially with Breen as the guide.

Breen is better known — at least to the parents of the kids in the planetarium — as the voice of the Fairbanks' "Eye on the Sky" morning weather forecasts and the afternoon "Eye on the Night Sky" stargazing reports on Vermont Public. After all, he's led those broadcasts, which number about 20 a day, for 42 years. His voice is always welcoming and familiar, even on a crackling car stereo with sketchy reception in the Vermont boonies. But in the confines of the planetarium, it has Oz-like gravitas.

That's partly a trick of acoustics — the domed planetarium screen makes sound extra resonant. But it's also a credit to Breen's local authority after four decades as the voice of weather and astronomy in Vermont.

Now more than ever, people are listening. The northern part of Vermont lies directly in the eclipse's "path of totality," a roughly 100-mile-wide swath running from Mexico to the Canadian Maritimes in which the moon will completely obscure the sun. (Viewers in locations above or below the path will see only a partial eclipse.) This once-in-a-lifetime event is expected to draw anywhere from 50,000 to 200,000 visitors to the state, and nearly every town and city along the path, from Middlebury to Newport, is hosting events and planning public safety measures to deal with the unprecedented influx.

Breen's star is rising in the lead-up to the big day. Planetarium attendance is up 114 percent. As local and national media outlets report on the eclipse, they are seeking his expertise, along with his unique way of making science accessible. School groups, too, have been calling.

What makes audiences tune in — whether for a casual weather report or a full-on eclipse explainer — isn't just Breen's depth of knowledge about the sky and the stars. It's how effortlessly he seems to transfer it to listeners, students and anyone else who might be curious.

"Mark has a strong poetic sense," said Anna Rubin, the museum's director of external relations. "And he brings that to weather and astronomy.

"He's a true scientist at heart," she continued. "He wants to be that bridge to people's understanding of the world."

---

Model Forecast

Breen is slim and slight of stature, with white hair and a neatly trimmed, mostly white beard. He favors cozy sweaters and khakis and generally gives off the amiable air of your favorite middle school science teacher. He says he wanted to be a weatherman from the time he was in seventh grade — a desire born more of necessity than a geeky interest in atmospheric sciences or a fascination with slick-talking weather reporters on TV.

Breen wanted to predict the weather, he said, because "I was really good at building snowmen."

He was born in Dannemora, an upstate New York town that's home to a famous prison and — at least in the 1960s before climate change had its say — prodigious snow in the winter. But Breen's family moved around a lot, trailing his Montgomery Ward salesman father to Potsdam, N.Y., and Montpelier, Vt., before finally landing in Connecticut.

"Which was really disappointing, because they didn't have as much snow," Breen recalled. "So I always wanted to know when the next storm would be."

He became a fan of "Boston's first TV weatherman," Don Kent on WBZ-TV, and "America's Wittiest Weatherman," AccuWeather's Elliot Abrams.

When he was 12, Breen joined the Boy Scouts with some friends who, like him, he joked, were "mostly just looking to go camping and goof off." But being a scout meant earning merit badges. So Breen looked for the easiest ones. Among them: the weather merit badge.

"You had to watch the weather and write down your observations for three weeks, and then you had to make a prediction," he said. With an eyebrow raise, he added, "But it never said you had to be right. So how hard could that be?"

Breen doesn't remember how accurate his first prediction was, which he says is beside the point anyway.

"The ingenious part of that is, if you start paying attention to something, enough that you're writing it down every day, if it is something that interests you, you may not stop," he said. "And I never did."

Breen continued keeping a personal weather record all through middle and high school, where he focused on math and science. As a teenager, he wrote a computer forecasting program based on a rudimentary forecasting model in the book Weather: A Golden Guide.

Like his merit badge prediction, Breen can't say how accurate his high school computer models were. In part, that's because he never considered the program to be complete. What started out as a simple program drawing on basic weather info such as temperature, barometric pressure and wind direction became more sophisticated, along with Breen's own growing understanding of the weather.

"I was constantly adding to it, but I never felt like I got it finished," he admitted.

Still, to build a computer program — in high school in the 1970s, no less — that aims to predict the weather takes an awful lot of curiosity and resourcefulness. Those were qualities that would come to define Breen in his professional life.

---

Convergence Zones

From Willard Scott and Al Roker to Vermont's Sharon Meyer and Tom Messner, the most beloved weather personalities succeed not only on the strength of their forecasts but in how they deliver them. Weather people need to be likable, which by all accounts Breen is. But there's also a performative aspect to the job that makes being a good weather forecaster as much an art as it is a science. When he graduated high school, Breen already had a solid foundation in the latter.

Because he was anxious to get back to Vermont after high school, Breen enrolled in the meteorology program at Lyndon State College — now Vermont State University — to continue his journey to becoming a TV weatherman. But a funny thing happened on the way to the Weather Channel: He caught the acting bug.

During his first semester at Lyndon, a dorm mate who was a theater major asked if Breen could help build sets for an upcoming production. Before he knew it, he'd been talked into a small, nonspeaking role in the show.

"I really enjoyed it," he said.

Theater became a diversion from the heavy science and math curriculum of studying weather. Acting and singing in Damn Yankees, Once Upon a Mattress and other shows was also a creative and social outlet. Onstage at Lyndon and in community theater productions, Breen forged relationships that have lasted a lifetime. That includes meeting his future wife, Sandi, during a production of Carousel when he was 18.

"I just thought he was so cute," she recalled.

The two were fast friends but didn't become romantically involved until a couple of decades, and divorces, later. They've now been married for 20 years, with five children between them — two from her previous marriage, three from his — and a few grandkids. "We just got together and knew it was right," she said.

Sandi describes her husband as kind, dedicated, driven and "a great father." He's an avid reader, she noted, who read to his kids nightly at bedtime. But because he keeps such odd hours — he's up a 3:15 a.m. every day to prepare the morning forecasts — he would usually fall asleep mid-book. "So they learned to read by finishing the books themselves," she said.

Breen's friends and colleagues noted that the velvety voice you hear on air is the same one he uses in person. Sandi confirmed her husband really does speak like that around their house in St. Johnsbury.

"He has that beautiful voice and timbre to it," she said, adding that Breen is a wonderful singer — the couple perform in a folk quartet called Wind Rose. "It's like it resonates in your chest. It's an incredible feeling."

Sandi revealed that her husband never swears. In part, it's because he's afraid of accidentally cursing on air. But also, she said, "He's very proper."

Acting helped Breen cultivate that smooth voice and delivery, which prepared him for a career behind the microphone — one that started sooner than he expected.

---

The Imperfect Storm

In 1981, the Fairbanks Museum partnered with Vermont Public Radio to launch the "Eye on the Sky" weather forecasts. Steve Maleski, who cofounded the meteorology department at Lyndon, was the original host. But a few months in, Maleski was offered a dream job with the Weather Channel in Atlanta. He needed to find a replacement.

Still a student, Breen was one of two young Lyndon meteorologists Maleski chose to share the role. (The other was Jon Talbot, who went on to a career as the chief meteorologist for the U.S. Air Force Reserve's hurricane hunters — they're the folks who fly aircraft into storms to measure their strength.)

Was it Breen's innate understanding of Vermont's weird weather patterns that landed him the gig? His smooth and inviting on-air demeanor?

Not quite.

"What I was looking for was people that were competent at meteorology and willing to work in the Northeast Kingdom," Maleski said. "I had nothing more specific than that in mind."

Breen easily cleared that low bar. He was hired full time at the Fairbanks after graduation in 1982.

But it soon became clear: "He had an exceptional on-air presence," said Maleski, who returned to Vermont, and the "Eye on the Sky" team, in 1984. "He was able to connect with Vermont Public's audience."

Sometimes he connects with them personally, too.

When Breen started at the Fairbanks, the museum didn't have access to Doppler radar or other sophisticated forecasting tools. Instead, weather data arrived daily at 3 a.m. via a World War II-era teletype machine. A bleary-eyed Breen would synthesize that info in the predawn hours and then check in with the National Weather Service by phone before crafting and calling in the day's reports.

On March 13, 1984, a massive blizzard was bearing down on northern Vermont. Yet nobody knew it. There was snow in the forecast, but, according to Maleski, because someone at the National Weather Service in Albany, N.Y., had misread the data, local forecasters had wildly underestimated how much. The storm walloped the region overnight.

Breen had predicted six to 12 inches of snow, so he got up a little early the morning of March 14 and discovered at least that much already on the ground. By the time he'd shoveled his driveway, there was another six inches of snow on his car.

Breen cleared the snow, hopped in his silver Chevy Chevette and began the 10-mile drive south from Lyndonville to the Fairbanks to do the weather for the radio. But when he got on the interstate, it seemed the road hadn't been plowed.

"What I wasn't realizing was that it was snowing between four and six inches an hour," he recalled, chuckling at the memory. He discovered that road crews were in fact plowing the interstate, but not the off-ramps, when he took his exit and his car was suddenly stuck in two feet of powder.

Breen abandoned his tiny Chevette on the off-ramp and began trudging through drifting, waist-deep snow about a mile into town. A woman who was shoveling invited him in for coffee and to warm up. Breen doesn't drink coffee — he's a hot chocolate aficionado — but needed the warmth.

Looking at her clock, he realized there was no way he'd make it to the Fairbanks on time to call Vermont Public Radio. So he used the woman's phone and dialed into the radio station to report the weather from her living room.

Because he hadn't made it to the museum, "the only information is what I had in my head," Breen said. Somehow, he managed to do his entire weather segment, which back then was four to six minutes long.

"People have remembered that one for 40 years," he said.

The Blizzard of '84 wasn't the only time Breen missed on a forecast. Early in his tenure, he fielded an angry call from a listener in southern Vermont. Breen had predicted clear skies, but this caller reported a hailstorm in Bennington.

"There was nothing in my data that suggested that," Breen said. "I realized really quickly I needed more information."

So Breen went on the air one day and invited listeners who were up early to call in and give him weather reports from their parts of the state. A handful of folks did, several of whom still email Breen to this day.

Also creative: To make up for not having access to radar or satellite equipment, Breen went out and bought a 13-inch black-and-white television and a VCR — "because that's what the museum could afford" — to record TV news weather forecasts so he could study their radar displays.

"I got really good at sketching out radar and satellite images as soon as they came up on the TV," he said. He would use those maps to help plot out his own reports. Breen and his team often cite local landmarks such as Route 2 and the Green Mountains to help listeners visualize forecasts.

Breen also began incorporating old weather proverbs into his forecasts, a hallmark of his reports to this day. While it might seem odd for a science-minded meteorologist to give credence to Farmers' Almanac-style colloquialisms, Breen says there's wisdom to be found in them — and science that backs them up.

"It turns out that some of those actually work," he said. He noted that the timeworn saying "Red sky at night, sailor's delight" has been shown to predict smooth sailing — or clear skies — about 80 percent of the time. "That's a pretty good average," he said.

Here's another one: "Dew on the grass, rain will never pass."

"If you wake up in the morning and the grass is wet with dew, it's not gonna rain that day," Breen said, adding that the saying is about 80 or 90 percent accurate. He explained that for dew to form, the weather has to be clear and calm. "If it's clear and calm, there's no storm nearby," he said.

Many weather proverbs, even goofy ones, have a kernel of truth because they're based on time-tested observations. Sailors know "Red sky at night" thanks to centuries of navigating the seas. Farmers understand what dew means because they need dry days to hay their fields.

"If you're really looking at the sky, seeing how the wind is changing, you really do get a sense for what the weather is doing," Breen said. "It may not be quite the same as a satellite image, but you're fine-tuning your senses to what's going on."

---

On the Radar

One famous weather proverb that's generally been apt in Vermont is: "March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb." But a recent run of unseasonably warm days made early March decidedly less fierce. So when he began the March 4 "Eye on the Sky" morning forecast, Breen riffed.

"March appears to have arrived like a mild-mannered, toothless lion," he said.

It was classic Breen: not laugh-out-loud funny, but astute and gently charming. In other words, everything listeners have come to expect from their morning forecasts on Vermont Public over the past 42 years.

"His voice was made for radio," said Betty Smith-Mastaler, a programming producer who's been at Vermont Public since the radio station was founded in 1975. "He's warm, he's informative, and he's telling you something — just you — that you need in order to make your day work."

Alex Bonson agrees. The Williston resident is the mastermind behind Suspicious Duck, a line of "bootleg collectibles," memorabilia and toys that he invents, produces and sells, mostly online. While he does make some collectibles of broader interest, most are Vermont specific, such as "Truck Stuck in Notch," a tractor trailer that tried (and failed) to navigate the Smugglers' Notch road, and "F-35 Disrupting Your Day," a nod to the controversial Vermont National Guard jets.

But Bonson's most popular creation by far is a line of T-shirts, mugs and bumper stickers that read: "Don't talk to me until I've had my morning Eye on the Sky weather forecast with Mark Breen from the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury."

Bonson debuted the shirts — which feature an entire Breen forecast transcribed on the back — at the South End Art Hop in Burlington last year. They're now available at Thirty-odd, a Queen City boutique.

"When I was coming up with the shirts, I thought, What's something very niche that I personally really enjoy? Something that resonates with me and that I can relate to on a daily basis?" Bonson said. "And that was Mark Breen's daily forecast."

Bonson said he has since sold hundreds of his "Eye on the Sky" swag. Its success is a testament to the indelible imprint that Breen and his team — which includes meteorologists Lawrence Hayes, Christopher Kurdek and, until he retires in a few months, Maleski — have left on Vermont in an age when an up-to-the-minute weather forecast is available on your watch or phone.

"The fact that we still trust and care about what these actual live people have to tell us about the weather is kind of amazing," said Breen's Vermont Public colleague Jane Lindholm, host of the "But Why?" kids podcast and, formerly, the "Vermont Edition" talk show. "Mark is one of those people."

Perhaps because weather here is notoriously finicky, Vermonters do still need to rely on someone to make sense of it all.

"Because we never had the latest technology, I've always felt that our role has been ... to interpret the weather," Breen said. "What is the weather really doing? Why is it doing it? Worse: Why is the forecast wrong?"

These days, the "Eye on the Sky" meteorologists do use more sophisticated weather tech. They subscribe to a few specialty data services, but Breen said they largely base their predictions on the same publicly available info anyone can look up from the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The key is what they do with it.

"Eye on the Sky" segments range from fairly standard forecasts to deeply detailed atmospheric analyses. Depending on the season, they may be geared toward skiers or boaters or farmers and gardeners. The daily "Weather Journal" often includes notable historical weather events.

"I still want to hear Mark give me the weather, even if I've already heard it three times, because I trust what he has to say," Lindholm said. "He knows more than my weather app — he gives me more information, or different information.

"There's no logical reason that you still need a Mark Breen, and yet we do," Lindholm continued. "He's wonderful."

---

Star Struck

Breen knew from an early age that he was going to be a meteorologist. But he had no idea that he would also become an astronomer. While he received formal training in predicting the weather, his expertise in stargazing has been largely self-taught.

When he was hired at the Fairbanks to lead the "Eye on the Sky" team, he was also tasked with running the Lyman Spitzer Jr. Planetarium. Opened in 1962, the state's only public planetarium welcomes an average of 13,000 visitors a year, including 2,000 to 3,000 schoolchildren.

To be dropped into a situation where he was expected to be an expert but had no expertise was both daunting and exciting, Breen said. Daunting because he didn't necessarily know what he was doing. Exciting because it was an opportunity to learn.

"It's a playground of the imagination," he said.

To find his way around the night sky, he started at the beginning: by studying ancient astronomy. As a weather history buff, Breen has spent countless hours poring over records from the Fairbanks' weather station, the oldest operating station in the country. He also collects weather journals kept by farmers and weather enthusiasts. He drew similar historical inspiration from books about Stonehenge in England, Ireland's Newgrange and other mysterious ancient sites.

"I was fascinated with the idea that 5,000 years ago, before Stonehenge, they had figured out the length of the year — 365 and a quarter days — and the path of the sun against the background of the stars," he said.

That fascination comes through in Breen's daily "Eye on the Night Sky" stargazing dispatches, aired late afternoons on Vermont Public. While he doesn't lead stargazing sessions often anymore — being a super-early riser makes staying up late a challenge — he does host an annual Stargazing Party on Vermont Public. One night a year, usually in late summer, listeners can take their radios or smartphones outside and tune in as Breen describes what's happening in the heavens. Much like he does with the weather, Breen has a way of making the cosmos accessible without dumbing it down.

On the March 7 edition of the astronomy report, he used familiar constellations to orient listeners looking for a glimpse of our galaxy: "In March, the Milky Way is still fairly high across the western sky in the evening, running from the south, just above the bright star Sirius, then high in the west above Orion and Taurus, the Bull, then to the right of the bright star Capella, finally settling down into the north."

Four decades in, Breen is well regarded in astronomy circles. He's vice president of the Northeast Kingdom Astronomy Foundation and has taught introductory astronomy classes at Lyndon State and, more recently, Community College of Vermont. That college began offering classes in the new Fairbanks annex that opened last month, and Breen hopes to revive its astronomy program, which was shuttered during the pandemic.

Bill Vinton taught astronomy at St. Johnsbury Academy and is the president of the Northeast Kingdom Astronomy Foundation. While noting that Breen's expertise comes more from running the planetarium than from looking through telescopes at night, he said he appreciates how Breen has used his voice to raise the profile of astronomy in Vermont.

"He speaks with authority, and he's done a lot of research," Vinton said. "He speaks to a pretty wide audience, which I'm sure has encouraged people to go look up in the sky." In the lead-up to the eclipse, Breen has been interviewed by USA Today and other national outlets and is scheduled to appear on Public Radio International's "Science Friday."

"He really wants people to be interested and excited about the stars," Rubin said of Breen. "And he would love to make every show in our planetarium an entry point for people's further exploration."

There will never be a bigger show at the Fairbanks than the one on April 8.

On the day of the eclipse, the museum and Vermont Public will coproduce a special live broadcast hosted by Breen and Lindholm. Breen will have to balance his excitement as an astronomer with his experience as a weatherman.

Breen has studied weather patterns and history for early April in northern Vermont and determined that there's an 80 percent chance of clouds on the day of the eclipse.

"There's nothing I can do about that," Breen said with a shrug. However, he expects interest in the eclipse to linger long past April 8. "And," he added hopefully, "if we have a really great experience — maybe we get a partly sunny day — people will be talking about this for the rest of their lives."