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Monday’s solar eclipse may have proven more a bust than a blockbuster event for much of Luzerne County thanks to ill-timed cloud cover in many places, but it certainly doesn’t have to be old news already. It presents opportunities for school lessons and adult discussions about the science of it all that could last for days.
And while the science itself is interesting, the fact that humans figured it out with striking precision before we ever left the planet shows just how well humans can reason, when we want to.
We have calculated the size of the moon, the size of the sun, the size of the earth, the orbital paths and the ways they all interact. We have learned that the existence of solar eclipses hinges on a remarkable combination of moon and sun size, and how far away the two are from earth. Make the moon a bit smaller or the sun a bit bigger, or change the distance of either from earth, and a total eclipse would never happen.
Consider all the mistaken explanations before we did the math. A snake (or dragon, or frog, or puma or other animal) attacks the Sun god. The moon takes away the energy of the sun. It’s a fight between the sun and the moon. It’s a sister and brother (sun and moon respectively) playing a game of catch me if you can, with an eclipse showing the brother caught up.
Even now, it’s easy to be misinformed. Since total eclipses are rarely visible where you live, it’s reasonable to think they don’t happen very often. Yet they happen almost like clockwork every 18 months; they just don’t happen in the same place.
And our ability to not only predict them accurately but to look back in time and know when they occurred has become the stuff of time travel fiction. The most famous example may be Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” in which the protagonist, stuck back in the Middle Ages, uses his knowledge of a coming eclipse to save his life by appearing to control day and night.
So even if clouds thwarted our viewing of the partial eclipse here or the full eclipse in the path of totality, the astronomical marvel can feed conversations, spark imaginations and revive an appreciation for good science.
Science, incidentally, helped change eclipses from dread omen and superstition to social celebration. People actually stop scrolling and posting, stop watching their own preferred livestream video or listening to the music they like best, and gather to look up to the sky and participate in the same activity, together.
As reported in Tuesdays paper, hundreds gathered at the Penn State Wilkes-Barre Campus Monday for an eclipse viewing party. As they so often do, PSU-WB staff and students showed what a wonderful gem the place is in Luzerne County, with arts, crafts, tours of the Friedman Observatory and readings in the library of a children’s picture book, “The Sky is the Limit.”
The viewing drew people from around the state, and even beyond. Lindsay and George Gettinger of Rhode Island were visiting family and opted to come.
“We came up to watch the eclipse with a lot of other people rather than just ourselves,” George said.
An eclipse seems to remind us, as a nation and a world, of things we share. And that’s a phenomenon that can last with or without clouds.