Traveling to the solar eclipse

I took a trip to Buffalo to see my third total solar eclipse. On the train from New York there were countless hats, t-shirts and glasses with a slogan referring to the phenomenon – there were amateur astronomers, families, New Age nostalgics. Guest of friends whose house was precisely in the trajectory of the totalities, I was able to arrange the equipment to record some videos in the garden as I liked. For some time I have been interested above all in research on the environmental conditions of the occurrence of the eclipse. Let me explain. You will have seen by now the thousands of videos and photographs of the different phases of the eclipse. The moon biting the sun. The moon covering the sun. The bumps. The crown. The moon slipping away from the sun. An unparalleled spectacle, there is nothing, absolutely nothing on earth that can even remotely come close to it, and there is no video or photography that can convey the emotion of seeing the black sun blaze in the sky. It’s worth traveling for the once in a lifetime experience.

I’ll say straight away that this time it went badly. The sky was clear, then it clouded over, then it became relentlessly overcast. We nervously followed the weather forecast on the apps with the radar reproducing cloud cover, wind speed, forecast of clear spells minute by minute, but there was no escape. Even if we saw several partial phases, during the totality the stars were invisible, unruly, hidden.

What happened on the ground, however, exceeded all expectations. The shadow of the moon was seen arriving on the canopy of the clouds, at breathtaking speed. Night fell in a matter of seconds. (The gardens of American homes have various lighted ornaments that are activated at dusk to cheer up the neighbourhood: their sensors, deceived by the fall of light, have given life to a Christmas market of unlikely lights.) Thus darkness has arrived quickly that no loss of light was noticed: it is as if the things themselves had changed color, or had been covered by a dark, sickly dust. We wished for the sun to return; we saw the tail of the shadow free the clouds above us, to continue its furious race towards the north-east, like a wind of darkness.

The experience

The experience was epistemically transformative. We should take a step back, remember how we came to understand the mechanism of eclipses, how the Babylonians had already managed to compile a catalog over long series that allowed us to understand some regularities, at least for lunar eclipses. The story is long and exciting, but the point I would like to underline is that the experience of a total eclipse, and in particular without being able to see the sun and moon, puts us in direct contact with distant ancestors, all those who suddenly they found themselves in a very fast, inexplicable, scary night, and a source of curiosity. The eclipse creates an epistemic commonality between us and them. The ancients learned some things from eclipses: for example, it seems trivial, that the moon is closer to the earth than the sun is. That the sun has a flaming crown. That if we can calculate, as Aristarchus did, the ratio between the earth-moon and moon-sun distances (1/20 for Aristarchus, 1/400 in reality), we can conclude that the sun is much larger than moon (eight thousand times for the low estimate). Little by little, quantitative data will bring order to the phenomena, and we will be able to predict the trajectory of the solar eclipse (as a physicist friend tells me, it is thanks to Laplace that hoteliers in the USA have managed to do good business this year ).

The shadow of the moon

But the direct perception of an eclipse does something very powerful, it places us in the cosmos. The shadow of the moon reaches us, licks the clouds above us. Because it is precisely the shadow of the moon that we see, as if our satellite had reached out a hand to touch us, remind us that we are the smallest part of powerful and imperturbable architectures of space and time.