Now we know better, but if we don’t look at solar eclipses with the same fear or fables that the ancients did, we still regard them with a combination of wonder, delight, and appreciation for the movement of the cosmic clockworks. The eclipse that will begin in the Arctic, over northern Russia at 7:54 p.m. local time on Aug. 12 and pass over and down through Greenland, Iceland, Spain, and the Mediterranean Sea—nipping the northeast corner of Portugal on the way—will be no different. And it will be the first total solar eclipse to pass over central Europe since 1999.
It’s only by a bit of celestial serendipity that perfect solar eclipses occur at all. The sun is about 865,000 miles wide—or 400 times larger than the 2,159-mile wide moon. But the sun is also 93 million miles away—or close to 400 times further than the moon, which is, on average, 239,000 miles from Earth. The result is that the disks of both bodies appear to be roughly the same size in the sky. When the moon passes in front of the sun in the just-so juxtaposition of a total eclipse, it thus causes the solar body to be blacked out entirely and the solar fires to flare brilliantly around the intervening moon.
There is, too, a third kind of eclipse known as an annular eclipse—caused by the vagaries of the moon’s orbit. The path the moon inscribes around the Earth is elliptical rather than circular. At its closest approach—or perigee—the moon is about 226,000 miles distant. At its farthest—or apogee—it drifts out to a 251,000-mile remove. The more distant the moon, the smaller it appears; if a solar eclipse happens when the moon is at apogee, the lunar disk is thus not large enough to cover the entire body of the sun, creating a so-called ring of fire effect, with part of the solar body visible around the entire circumference of the moon. On average, annular eclipses occur two times a year.
To take advantage of that opportunity, two expeditions of astronomers—one from the Greenwich Observatory and one from Cambridge University—set out for Sobral, Brazil and the island of Principe off the west coast of Africa, where the approaching 1919 eclipse would be visible. During the brief minutes of totality, they charted the precise positions of stars near the sun that popped into view when the lights went out. On subsequent evenings, after the sun had set, they mapped the positions of the same stars and found that they indeed differed slightly from the measurements taken during the eclipse.
No such sensational studies will be conducted during the upcoming eclipse but some work will get done. During totality, NASA plans to fly a chase plane at 50,000 ft.—above cloudtop level—to observe the sun’s corona in different wavelengths of visible and infrared light. Moving at 480 miles per hour, the on-board cameras will see three minutes of totality—longer than any point on the ground will get. Elsewhere, students from universities around the U.S. will travel to Iceland and Spain to take part in the Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project, releasing research balloons before, during, and after the eclipse to study atmospheric dynamics when things go suddenly dark and just as quickly brighten again.
For the vast majority of the lucky 15 million people—or just 0.2% of the world’s population—living in the path of totality, however, the eclipse will be all about the sky show. The presence of the sun in the daytime sky is one of nature’s great verities—but only until it isn’t. Bearing witness to that vanishing is a rare and fleeting privilege.
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