this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2024
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chapotraphouse

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Words, pictures, videos don't do it justice. I drove across the country for the one in 2017 and it was the most incredible thing I've ever seen. Sacrificing people on top of a pyramid isn't my preference but i kinda understand where the aztecs/mel gibson were coming from. For real though totality is like a divine searing hole opening in the sky that connects you to cosmic ancient human experience even if just for a few moments. The moon is an actual giant thing falling toward us in perpetuity and never is it more tangibly understandable as such than when it falls literally perfectly in front of the fucking sun. Streamers of plasma millions of miles long whipping out around the black disc of the moon. Undulating liquid-like shadow ripples called shadow bands appear on the actual ground, it's like standing on the beach looking down as a wave washes back out to sea but the beach is the planet on which all life lives and dies and the wave is the infinity of outer space, and you barely even hear about them because the eclipse itself is just that much more spectacular. ~~For most people in the united states, this is the last chance they'll have to see it in their lifetimes.~~ my bad actually there's another couple chances in 2044/2045, but still.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago (1 children)

From what we currently know about the universe, it is very very rare to have a moon the size of ours that can eclipse the view of our sun.

If we were part of an interstellar society, aliens from other systems would travel to Earth to view the eclipse.

[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

And it won't last forever. The Sun will expand in diameter, and the Moon will drift further from the Earth. According to Wikipedia:

Final totality

Total solar eclipses are seen on Earth because of a fortuitous combination of circumstances. Even on Earth, the diversity of eclipses familiar to people today is a temporary (on a geological time scale) phenomenon. Hundreds of millions of years in the past, the Moon was closer to the Earth and therefore apparently larger, so every solar eclipse was total or partial, and there were no annular eclipses. Due to tidal acceleration, the orbit of the Moon around the Earth becomes approximately 3.8 cm more distant each year. Millions of years in the future, the Moon will be too far away to fully occlude the Sun, and no total eclipses will occur. In the same timeframe, the Sun may become brighter, making it appear larger in size. Estimates of the time when the Moon will be unable to occlude the entire Sun when viewed from the Earth range between 650 million and 1.4 billion years in the future.

Those aliens better hurry up.