U.S. Umbraphiles Unite
It’s time for another total solar eclipse
Nasa calls it a “cosmic coincidence”—the Sun is roughly 400 times bigger than the Earth’s Moon, and is almost exactly 400 times farther away. The serendipitous result: when the Sun, Moon, and Earth are in perfect alignment (a wonderful astronomical term called syzygy), the disc of the Moon fits right inside the disc of the Sun like a jigsaw piece, and the Earth experiences a total solar eclipse.
Regular old solar eclipses aren’t actually that rare. The Sun, Moon, and Earth line up every six months during what’s called “eclipse season,” but because the Moon’s orbit is tilted at about five degrees of the Earth’s orbit, the shadow of the Moon often misses the Earth. Even when it is perfectly aligned and the Moon’s shadow does hit the Earth, the Moon’s elliptical orbit sometimes takes it farther away from the Earth, where it appears too small to totally fill the outline of the sun. (This is what’s known as an annular eclipse.) When the Moon’s orbit and tilt are just right though, something special happens—a total solar eclipse. Those are rare, but even so, they happen every eighteen months somewhere on Earth. The trouble for eclipse-chasers (also known as “umbraphiles”) is that solar eclipses trace the same geographic path only once every 360 to 410 years. So if you’ve got the chance to see the one this month, don’t miss it!
My favorite literary solar eclipse plays a central part in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. In Twain’s tale, an American engineer named Hank Morgan gets a bonk on the head that transports him in time and space back to 6th century England. (Naturally.) There, Hank makes an enemy of Merlin, who convinces King Arthur to burn the stranger at the stake. (Naturally.) Luckily, Hank realizes that the day he is scheduled to die is also the same day as a total eclipse of the Sun, and he tells the poor 6th century simpletons of Camelot that if they don’t let him go, he’ll make the sun disappear and never bring it back. The eclipse comes, the king and his gullible knights believe Hank to be a wizard on par with Merlin, and Arthur gives the American time traveler the keys to the kingdom. (Naturally.)
Setting aside the whole “bonk on the head transporting Hank to 6th century England” thing, it’s preposterous that Twain’s character, skilled engineer that he is, would remember the exact month, day, year, and location of a total solar eclipse that happened 1,300 years ago. Heck, I saw a total solar eclipse a while back, and I couldn’t tell you the year, let alone the day and month. (Turns out it was August 21, 2017, but I had to look it up!) That’s not even the most outlandish thing our hero gets up to in A Connecticut Yankee though. Hank uses his future knowledge to introduce gunpowder, telephones, revolvers, and bicycles to medieval England, spreading the gospel of American capitalism along the way. When the Catholic church sends thirty thousand knights to put an end to his heresies, Hank and a handful of teenagers he’s trained in the ways of science mow the entire army down with Gatling guns. (I told you—it’s a lot.)
Twain almost certainly got the idea about impressing the “uneducated natives” from a real-life story of Christopher Columbus. Late in Columbus’s fourth voyage, a storm forced Columbus and his crew to beach their ships in Jamaica. At first, the indigenous people of the island welcomed Columbus and his crew, and even fed them. But being the dick he was, Columbus and his sailors cheated their hosts and stole from them. Now, the people of Jamaica might not have been book-smart, but they weren’t stupid, and after six months of this nonsense they stopped bringing food to Columbus and his men and let them starve.
Rather than say, “Oh man, those guys were right to cut us off. We’ve been total dicks,” Columbus and his crew decided instead to play yet another trick on the Jamaicans. Columbus had a copy of an almanac on board that included astronomical tables, and he realized that they were soon due for a lunar eclipse. Columbus went to the Jamaicans and told them that his god was angry with them for not sharing their food anymore, and that his god would show them his displeasure by making the next full moon “inflamed with wrath.”
I should point out here that a lunar eclipse is different from a solar eclipse. A solar eclipse is one where the Moon comes between the Sun and the Earth, making everything in a direct line go dark. In a lunar eclipse, it’s the Earth that comes between the Moon and the Sun. If you’re on the night side of the Earth, the Moon in the sky disappears as though eaten up by the darkness of the Earth’s shadow, only to return a short time later as the Sun, Earth, and Moon fall out of alignment. Like solar eclipses, total lunar eclipses are more rare than partial eclipses. When a total lunar eclipse occurs (also known as a “deep eclipse”), something extra cool happens—the Moon doesn’t disappear, but instead turns red, thanks to light coming from the Earth’s atmosphere. (The geophysics are complicated, but the red Moon happens for the same reason that sunrises and sunsets are more orange than the light from the midday sun.)
It was this red Moon effect that Columbus knew was coming, and he figured he could use to spook the natives. The almanac proved right, and the full Moon rose red in the sky, totally freaking out the Jamaicans. Columbus’s son later wrote that the indigenous people “with great howling and lamentation came running from every direction to the ships laden with provisions, praying to the Admiral to intercede with his god on their behalf.” Columbus kept an eye on his hourglass, and just before the totality ended, he told the Jamaicans that his god forgave them and pardoned them, and would return their regular Moon to them. As long as they kept bringing him and his crew food, of course. Because Columbus was a dick.
Twain’s version of the eclipse trick is more famous now than Columbus’s, and has been repeated and parodied ever since. Four runaway children pull a similar stunt in Enid Blyton’s 1941 novel The Secret Mountain, Tintin does the exact same thing in 1948’s Prisoners of the Sun to escape the Incas (who in reality where such good astronomers they would never have fallen for it), and Bugs Bunny repeats the gag—and the whole trip to medieval England—in 1978’s “Bugs Bunny in King Arthur’s Court.” My favorite riff on predicting an eclipse to get out of trouble is from a 1992 Darkwing Duck episode in which Darkwing time travels to the Middle Ages. Convicted of being a warlock, he too conveniently remembers that a solar eclipse is imminent, and he starts reciting mumbo jumbo magic words he claims will make the sun go away. In typical Darkwing fashion though, his prediction is off by an entire day, and he spends the next twenty-four hours deliriously spouting nonsense until the eclipse finally occurs.
Okay. Allow me now to do what Hank Morgan and all his imitators have done for decades and predict that the next total solar eclipse in the United States will happen on April 8, 2024, with the path of totality stretching from Maine to Texas. Impressive, right? It’s like I’m magic! But wait—I can do even better than that. The next U.S. total solar eclipse after that will be on March 30, 2033, but umbraphiles will have to travel to Nome, Alaska to see it. (It will happen during peak aurora borealis season though, which should make for some impressive photographs.) Another total solar eclipse will appear briefly in Montana and North Dakota on August 22, 2044, but the real show will come on August 12, 2045.
In 2045, a six minute total solar eclipse that people are already calling the “Greatest American Eclipse” will travel in a swooping curve through the states of California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida—passing right over Walt Disney World. Talk about a magical day! Want to watch it with the mouse? Better book your room now. Many hotels in the path of this year’s eclipse have been sold out for more than a year, and even the cheapest motels with rooms left are charging a hefty premium. One Super 8 motel in Grayville, Illinois, whose rooms usually go for $95 a night, is charging $949 a night for a Sunday through Tuesday stay, and Motel 6 rooms are going for six times their normal rates. Maybe they should run a new ad campaign. This time around, instead of Tom Bodett saying “Motel 6: We’ll leave the light on for you,” he could say, “Motel 6: We’ll turn the sun off for you.”
Solar Eclipse Trivia
The answer to last week’s question—In 2020, Warren Moon’s former Canadian Football League team in Edmonton discontinued the use of the nickname “Eskimos,” replacing it with what animal, which is the second largest species in the deer family?—is Elks!
Here’s your solar eclipse trivia question:
What element was first detected independently by astronomers Pierre Janssen and Norman Lockyer by using spectroscopes to observe solar prominences during a total solar eclipse in 1868?
Drop your answer in the comments if you didn’t have to look it up!