The Sun-Eating Dragon Continued

Consider the experience of the writer Annie Dillard, watching a recent total solar eclipse from the hills of Washington state:

"From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was detaching. It was a loosened circle of evening sky, suddenly lighted from the back. It was an abrupt black body out of nowhere; it was a flat disk; it was almost over the sun. That is when there were screams. At once this disk of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly, it was dark night, on the land and in the sky. In the night sky was a tiny ring of light. The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring of light marked its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world. We were the world's dead people rotating and orbiting around and around, embedded in the planet's crust, while the earth rolled down. Our minds were light-years distant, forgetful of almost everything. Only an extraordinary act of will could recall us to our former, living selves and our contexts in matter and time. We had, it seems, loved the planet and loved our lives, but could no longer remember the way of them. We got the light wrong. In the sky was something that should not be there. In the black sky was a ring of light. It was a thin ring, an old, thin silver wedding band, an old, worn ring. It was an old wedding band in the sky, or a morsel of bone. There were stars. It was all over." ("Total Eclipse" in Teaching a Stone to Talk. )

And consider the enthusiasm and reverence expressed by J. B. Zirker, a veteran astronomer who has seen countless eclipses, in his account of an eclipse in 1980:

"I pull off the lens cap. Ray adjusts the pointing of the telescope a hair and says "GO!" Our motorized camera begins to whine and snap regularly, as Horst sets the time for increasingly long exposures. I look up. Incredible! It is the eye of God. A perfectly black disk, ringed with bright spiky streamers that stretch out in all directions. A few red prominences. A star or two. This fantastic object, blazing in the surrounding blackness, at mid-morning. What a stunning sight!"

Zirker, director of the Sacramento Peak Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico, understands better than most exactly what's happening during an eclipse, yet he still experiences the event as a momentary contact with the fantastic majesty of the universe.

Astrophysicist David Dearborn shares this feeling, "I've seen many eclipses, and each time it is just a marvelous experience, a phenomenal thing to see." As he puts it, eclipses are not interesting to scientists just because of all the phenomena that can be seen and researched, but because, "all of these beautiful and interesting things are happening during the middle of the day, when the sun just should be there!"

What power does knowledge have over terror? Does knowing how something works diminish its beauty and mystery? Or is the beauty of the world deepened by understanding the things we see? As you watch the total solar eclipse along with us and learn more about eclipses, ask yourself how your perception of this unique event is affected by the things you're learning.

[end]