I was on the road yesterday, or I would have had this post up already. I’m going to post several short posts today and maybe tomorrow to address a few things. I usually don’t do more than one post per day, but most of these topics aren’t really related.
This first post will be about the eclipse. I’ll tie it into my thoughts on a piece fo fiction.
I live in Texas, but I didn’t see a full eclipse. It was close, though. I think we had something like 97% of ther solar disk covered by the Moon at the peak. The stars didn’t come out, but the mosquitos did. There’s a rooster down the hill on the road behind our house that started crowing.
I didn’t try but one picture with my phone, and I was using glass from a welder’s mask. It didn’t turn out very well. I did get some good pictures of the eclipse projected through the leaves on one of the oak trees. That’s the best one on the left. You can click on it to see a larger image.
The gaps between the leaves act as pinholes, creating a projection of the eclipse on the ground, or in this case the ramp leading upo to the front porch.
There was a bit of cloud cover, but it was all upper level hazy stuff. You only really knew the clouds were there if you looked at the sky before the eclipse started and saw it was more white than blue.
This wan’t the first solar eclipse I’ve seen. It’s the closest I’ve come to seeing a total eclipse. It’s interesting how things get dark during an eclipse. It’s not like when it gets dark near sunset. Then there are long shadows. This type of darkness was like looking through dark glasses. All the shadows were in the right spots for that time of day, but the light on the objects in the yard was weaker. It’s had to describe other than saying it looked like I had dark sunshades on.
So, what does this have to do wtih fiction?
Well, I couldn’t help but think of Isaac Asimov’s classic story “Nightfall“. I looked at it a few years ago on my science fiction blog, Futures Past and Present. I’ll not rehash everything here. But it did get me thinking about a world with multiple suns where a solar eclipse occurred only once every thousand years. I didn’t have time to reread the story, but I did listen to an audio version of the story in the Science Ficetion Hall of Fame audio book last year.
What works of fiction incolving eclipses would you suggest reading?
I hauled the entire family to my in-laws’ place in the Hill Country (along the totality), only for cloud cover to mostly ruin the experience. Although we go to see the progress (sometimes with the clouds removing the need for eclipse glasses) and it definitely got much darker during, no matter how heavy the clouds were.
I was afraid we were going to have clouds as well. That was what the forecast predicted. I was very glad we didn’t.
In H. Rider Haggard’s “King Solomon’s Mines”, there is an episode in which the adventurers have gotten in trouble with the natives. One of them has an almanac, and observes that there will be a total lunar eclipse the following night. They convince that natives that they will darken the moon if they aren’t freed. Sure enough, the eclipse happens on schedule, the natives panic, and our heroes get away. This feels like a familiar trope, but I can only think of the one example!
Thanks. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any other places it has been used.
I saw the partial phase of the 1979 eclipse when I was in college and the crescents shadows through the trees dazzled me! I saw totality in 2017 but decided not to drive and watched the crescents on the ground once again in 2024—on the campus where I had seen them in 1979!
I’ve been fortunate enough to see sevreral partials, including an annular at sunset.