The Eclipse – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This Monday, North America experienced its second total solar eclipse in the last decade. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane

This Monday, North America experienced its second total solar eclipse in the last decade.

I remember being over-the-moon excited when we began preparing for the Total Solar Eclipse in August 2017. Several weekends before the eclipse, my parents and I drove north from Kansas City into the path of totality to scout out possible places where we might travel on Eclipse Day to see the phenomenon for ourselves. Eclipse Day 2017 also happened to be my first day as a history graduate student at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. That morning a sudden summer thunderstorm rolled through Kansas City and as the day continued the clouds persisted in our skies. When the moment of totality arrived around 12:55 pm on 21 August, we watched it through darkened clouds and heard the birds and insects around us revert to their nocturnal states and songs.

I was excited to have experienced a total solar eclipse yet disappointed that I wasn’t able to see it. So, when the prospect of traveling for this week’s total solar eclipse appeared, I seriously considered going afield to Texas to observe it. That trip didn’t end up working out because of a series of scheduling conflicts, and so instead seeing that the cloud forecast across North America called for most places along the path of totality to be obscured, I decided to stay here in Kansas City and observe our partial solar eclipse. At its greatest extent, the April 2024 solar eclipse reached about 90.5% totality. I was able to see that extent, yet the feel of it was quite different than 100% totality from seven years ago. We were watching Everyday Astronaut and the Planetary Society’s live broadcast from the Society’s Eclipse-o-rama event in Fredericksburg, Texas while observing the eclipse here at home, and what they experienced was far more dramatic than what we observed. I do regret not travelling for this eclipse, yet at the same time in the circumstances as they fell, I’m glad I chose to stay home all the same.

This concept of an eclipse is one that speaks to me both astronomically, as a big space nerd, historically, and linguistically. Eclipses are phenomena that have made their mark on the psyche of more than just us humans, note how the birds began singing their twilight songs when the Moon passed in front of the Sun. I have never put much theological potency into eclipses because we have been able to predict their occurrences with increasing accuracy for generations now. Religion, in many ways, relies on our perceptions of things. Some see in an eclipse a threat to divine order in the Cosmos. This view reminds me of Mozart’s final opera, near to my favorite of his works, Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) in which the Queen of the Night is defeated by Sarastro, the high priest of the Temple of the Sun. Sarastro proclaims victory for the good and right, singing: 

(Source: Aria-Database.com, trans. Lea Frey)

The divine hand is better seen in the wisdom of devising a manner to mathematically ascertain the revolutions of these celestial orbs, to borrow the title of Copernicus’s magnum opus, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. In our ability to ascertain our surroundings, and to make sense of nature we see a loving design.

Still, knowledge of the movements of the Sun, planets, moons, and stars across our night skies have had their impact in our history. During his fourth voyage, on 1 March 1504, after 9 months stranded in Jamaica, Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) used his knowledge of eclipses from an almanac he brought with him written by the Castilian Jewish astronomer Abraham Zacuto (1452 – c. 1515) to inspire the Taíno caique of that part of Jamaica to give Columbus’s men food and provisions. Columbus wrote in his journals that he pointed at the Moon and told the Taíno that “God caused that appearance, to signify his anger against them for not bringing the food” to Columbus and his men.^[1] Several years ago then, when discussing this story with a friend and fellow Renaissance historian, I decided to use the Stellarium astronomy program to simulate this lunar eclipse as Columbus and those with him in Jamaica saw it. Our ability to track the movements of these celestial orbs is good enough that our computers can show exactly what was visible in the night sky (baring any atmospheric data) at any moment in the past or future.

This ability to calculate the dates and locations of eclipses came in handy when researchers look at mentions of eclipses in ancient literature to seek to date the events of the stories. Plutarch and Heraclitus both argued that the Odyssey contains “a poetic description of a total solar eclipse,” which astronomers Carl Schoch and P.V. Neugebauer proposed matched an eclipse which occurred over the Ionian Sea on 16 April 1178 BCE, though a more recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Constantino Baikouzis and Marcelo O. Magnasco offer doubts concerning this proposition owing to the difficulty of finding exact matches in spite of centuries of the Odyssey‘s transmission through the oral tradition before it was written.^[2] Still, that eclipses are so readily discernible and measurable with our mathematics speaks to the potential that they could be used to date moments long remembered only in heroic literature like Odysseus’s return to Ithaca in Book 20 of the Odyssey (20.356-57). In this effort, where others divine gods, we make tools out of the Sun and Moon to better understand ourselves.

The way we describe an eclipse speaks to our culture’s relationship with the phenomenon. Our Modern English word derives from the same word in Old French, which developed from the Latin eclīpsis, which in turn was borrowed from the Ancient Greek ἔκλειψις (ékleipsis), which comes from the verb ἐκλείπω (ekleípō)meaning to abandon, go out, or vanish.” Eclipse eclipsed the Old English word āsprungennes, which derives from the past participle of the verb āspringan, meaning “to spring up, to spread out, to run out, to cease or fail.” As an adjective, āsprungen meant that something was defunct or deficient, so perhaps this sense of an eclipse meant that it seemed for a moment as though the Sun had run out of energy and ceased to burn? Again, this speaks to the idea that nature had limits as humanity does, to an older understanding of nature from the perspective of a limited human lifespan. 

In Irish, there is the Hellenic word éiclips, yet there’s an older Gaelic word which means the same thing, urú. Now, usually students of the Irish language will learn of urú in the context of Irish grammar, an urú or eclipsis is one way that Irish handles both consonant clusters and situations when one word ends in a vowel and the following word begins with another vowel. So, in that sense the word gets eclipsed by this urú which preserves some of the integrity of the language. Yesterday’s eclipse then was less an urú focail (word eclipse) and more a urú gréine (solar eclipse). That both the Sun and the words we speak in Irish can be eclipsed makes this astronomical phenomenon all the more ordinary and measurable. 

We use this word eclipse beyond astronomy in many cases; it seems to me today that the old guard of the Republican Party has been eclipsed by an orange political pulsar whose violent rhetoric and chaotic behavior have eaten away at their party’s support in these last 8 years, not unlike a pulsar discovered by NASA’s Swift and Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer satellites in 2007. An eclipse is something wonderous to behold yet ordinary in how readily we can predict when they will appear. They have given us a great deal of cultural qualifications that continue to influence how we see our world.

On Monday then, when the sky began to darken as the Moon passed in front of the Sun, I noticed that the color spectrum that I’ve always known began to change. Before my eyes the colors seemed to take on a sort of metallic glow, as if the light which illuminated them was shifting into a spectrum that seemed unnatural to the natural world I’ve known. The Sun is fundamental to how we understand the world around us. Its light is what illuminates our senses, and without it, or even with partial changes to its glow, we would find ourselves observing a very different world.

^[1] Christopher Columbus, “The Fourth Voyage,” Select Letters of Christopher Columbus: With Other Original Documents Relating to the Four Voyages to the New World, trans. and ed. R. H. Major, (London: Haklyut Society, 1847), 226.

^[2] Constanino Baikouzis and Marcelo O. Magnasco, “Is an eclipse described in the Odyssey?” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105, no. 26 (2008): 8823–8828, nn. 1, 12–14.