1 year from today,
the shadow of the Moon will slam into the Earth at sunrise at a point in
the north central Pacific Ocean. 27 minutes later, it will touch the
landscape of the United States for the first time in over 38 years. It will
take 94 minutes to cross our country. The shadow will swiftly sweep out into
the Atlantic, and 195 minutes after it first laid a kiss on the cheek of our
planet, after traveling over 8500 miles, it will lift off into space.1
The countdown
continues. Years. Months. Weeks. Days. Hours. Minutes.
But the time that it
takes for people who have never experienced a total solar eclipse to realize
how incredible the experience really is may be much shorter than that.
Consider this quote
from an eclipse observer in 1842:
"No degree of partial eclipse up to the last moment of
the sun's appearance gave the least idea of a total eclipse." 2
and this other quote
from an eclipse in 1998:
“The sun was a thinning
crescent. Jupiter, Mars, and Mercury appeared. Shadow bands strobed over the
earth– it looked as if I were looking at the planet through the blades of a
rotating fan. I looked at the sun through a mylar filter and watched it narrow,
narrow, and then it was gone. Around me there was a collective gasp, but the
filter was black……. So I dropped the filter, and gaped up at the sun, and I
thought to myself, “Oh my Gawwwwwwwd.” In the first
fifth of a second I understood why people traveled thousands of miles to see
these things. ……. It was the most awesome thing I’d ever seen in Nature.3Millions of people along the narrow path of totality will be truly be awestruck as they experience the true wonder of a total eclipse of the Sun on August 21, 2017.
Will you be one of them?
Sources:
2. George Airy,
remarking on a total eclipse in 1842. (Quote appears in the book “Totality,
Eclipses of the Sun” by Mark Littman, Ken Willcox, and Fred Espenak (not sure
of original source.))
3. http://www.walterjonwilliams.net/totality-in-curacao.html
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