A Final Thought: Eclipse Myths
By Mitch Allen
I like science, especially astrophysics. But as an English major, I’m self-taught. I read physics books and articles and listen to podcasts. It’s hard to get your head around how curved space-time causes gravity (I surely haven’t grasped it yet), so it’s nice when something easy comes along.
Like a total eclipse of the sun.
It’s a big deal. The last total solar eclipse in Ohio was June 16, 1806, a couple of weeks after future president Andrew Jackson killed attorney Charles Dickinson in a duel. In the local newspaper, Dickinson had called Jackson “a poltroon and a coward” and Old Hickory was having none of it.
In other words, it was a long time ago.
But solar eclipses aren’t that rare. There are two to five partial eclipses every year, with a total eclipse taking place somewhere on Earth about every 18 months. What’s rare is when it happens where you live.
There is nothing magical or mystical about a solar eclipse. It’s simply the moon passing in front of the sun and casting a shadow. That’s it. No ominous force will blind you or destroy your cell phone. If you stare at the sun for two-and-half hours on any day it will fry your retinas, not just during an eclipse. And, yes, we may have a disruption in our cell phone service, but that will be due to so many people being on their phones at the same time, using up their carriers’ bandwidth. Kinda like how service slows down at Blossom during a Dave Matthews concert.
The moon, by the way, isn’t as close to us as most science textbooks show. If the Earth were the size of a one-foot diameter ball, the moon would be the size of a tennis ball 30 feet away, the same distance a football team must travel to secure a first down—10 yards. The sun, on the other hand, would be the size of a McMansion about two miles away. So although the sun is much bigger than the moon, it’s so far away the two bodies appear to be the same size in the sky.
Now, you may have on occasion seen a beautiful full moon low on the horizon and noticed how large it appears, but when you took a photo with your phone camera the image revealed a regular-sized moon. That’s because your camera took a photo of reality, while your brain was telling you the moon was larger than it really is. That’s what the brain does sometimes. It ignores reality.
However, you can fix this illusion by simply standing on your head and looking at the oversized moon upside down. Your brain will immediately correct the illusion, and the moon will return to normal size. I heard about this phenomenon last year on a popular BBC science podcast called “The Infinite Monkey Cage” and didn’t believe it. So in January when I was in Florida, I watched a moonset on the beach. As the moon approached the horizon it grew larger and larger. Finally, I turned around, bent over and looked at the moon upside down between my legs. Sure enough, the moon immediately returned to its normal size. And, sure enough, the blood immediately rushed to my head, and I passed out.
As you probably know by now, the eclipse in Cleveland will occur on the same day as the Guardians’ home opener, an annual event during which it is not unusual for the weather to be cold, cloudy and even snowy. If that happens, this eclipse will undoubtedly become known as “the sno-clipse of 2024.”
But no worries. Even if we can’t see the sun through Cleveland’s clouds, we’ll still experience the world slowly growing dark for 1 hour, 15 minutes, then slowly getting light again for another 1 hour, 15 minuets. In the middle of which—for 3 minutes and 50 seconds—we’ll experience the eerie darkness of complete totality.
Even Mark Twain wrote about an eclipse. In his 1889 book “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” the protagonist travels back in time to the year 528 and is sentenced to be burned at the stake. However, he recalls from his studies that a solar eclipse will occur just minutes prior to his scheduled demise, so he threatens to blot out the sun if he’s executed. When the sky indeed darkens, he is pardoned and becomes King Arthur’s principal adviser in place of Merlin.
See, it’s smart to pay attention to total solar eclipses.