Description
It’s a dance that’s been playing itself out for millennia. On average, once every year and a half, the moon slips directly between the Earth and the sun, punching a hole of darkness into the daytime sky. And whenever possible, there have been people below, looking up.
By all accounts, experiencing a total solar eclipse is revelatory, especially so for people who study them.
Shadia Habbal, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii, originally from Syria, says, “I mean, every eclipse gives you new information.” For instance, 2,500 years ago, “the Babylonians could actually predict the occurrence of eclipses.”
They did it using careful records of previous eclipses. “They didn’t know anything about Newton,” Habbal says, “but you can say they preceded him by thousands of years.”
Essentially, the Babylonians used eclipses to infer basic laws of motion. Newton, of course, was the guy who later derived those basic laws in the 17th century, building on the work of Johannes Kepler, who had figur
