5 Weird Things That Happen During a Solar Eclipse

Solar eclipses are remarkable. For only a few minutes, and for a small number of people in the right place, the moon and the sun appear to be the exact same size, meaning that the sun is completely blocked out. But a solar eclipse also causes some truly bizarre phenomena here on Earth.

Already, eclipses are quite strange. After all, the sun’s diameter is 400 times that of the moon, while it’s roughly 27 million times more massive. But if all of these celestial bodies are in the exact right place, and you are in exactly the right place on Earth, you’ll be able to see this extraordinary event.

The total shadow of a solar eclipse is called an “umbra”, and this is where you need to be to witness the total eclipse. Eclipses are still stunning without totality – when you’re in the “penumbra” but everybody should experience standing in the moon’s umbra once in their lifetime. Globally, a total eclipse occurs every eighteen months, but they’re always in different places. If you want to see two total eclipses from the same place, you’re going to have to wait a long time, potentially hundreds of years.

This is in stark contrast to a lunar eclipse, where the moon is completely in the Earth’s shadow, which can be seen across the entire hemisphere that happens to be facing the moon at the time. That’s half the world’s population, versus just the few thousand who can experience a total solar eclipse at the same time. And in fact, Earth is very unique in its ability to have a solar eclipse at all.

None of the other inner planets have moons large enough, and while the gas giants certainly do, they also don’t have a surface anybody could stand on to actually witness such an event. But beyond the eclipse itself, one of the first weird things you’ll see are called “shadow bands”.

These are moving, twisting, shadowy lines that move across the planet’s surface in the lead-up to and aftermath of a total solar eclipse. It can be very unsettling to see ominous shadows moving around of their own accord, and could be a reason why eclipses have often been seen as something sinister.

But shadow bands are simply a result of the sun’s light being refracted in Earth’s atmosphere as the sun disappears behind the moon. Earth’s atmosphere is always moving, but only during an eclipse can we glimpse just how chaotic it is. If you take your eyes away from planet Earth and look at the eclipse itself – using a safe instrument like a pinhole camera, of course you’ll see another strange effect called “Baily’s beads”.

This is the name for the small “beads” of sunlight that creep around the edges of the moon, which happens simply because the moon is not a perfect sphere: it’s got an uneven, cratered surface. So, even when the moon is the exact same size as the sun, you can still see these beads forming around the edges, which can make it look as if a huge, diamond ring has appeared in the sky.

Something else unique you’ll be able to see in the sky during an eclipse are the two planets closer to the sun than Earth: Mercury and Venus. While these planets are among the brightest objects in the night sky, they’re not usually visible during the day, although you can sometimes make them out at sunrise.

Ordinarily, Mercury is too small and too close to the sun to see properly. The same is also often true of Venus. During the eclipse that happened in the US in 2017, four planets were visible to the naked eye, with people able to see Mars and Jupiter as well. Though any amateur astronomer with a telescope can find these planets, it’s astonishing to be able to see all four of them up in the sky at once during daylight hours.

Although the sun is obscured by a total solar eclipse, strangely, the eclipse can make some parts of the largest object in the solar system easier to see. You still need to be careful to use a pinhole camera or specially made solar glasses to actually look at the eclipse without hurting your eyes. But if you take those precautions, then you’ll be able to see all kinds of things.

Specifically, you might be able to see the sun’s solar prominences. A solar prominence is a gaseous ejection from the sun’s surface, and such phenomena can become the more famous coronal mass ejections, or CMEs. If a CME happens during a solar eclipse and you’re able to see it, it will be spectacular; though we’re millions of miles away from the sun, you’ll be able to see gasses erupting from the sun’s surface with the naked eye around the edge of the moon.

Ordinarily, the sun is just way too bright to ever see this without specialized equipment, such as a “coronagraph”, which is a telescope expressly designed to see CMEs. But those are things that happen in space. What about other things that happen on Earth during an eclipse? Well, eclipses have long been noted to cause strange behavior in Earth’s animal population. This is because animals don’t understand what an eclipse is, and the experience can be confusing and even distressing for many of them.

As the eclipse happens, the world is plunged into a temporary nighttime that only lasts for a few minutes at best, while the temperature in the umbra drops. So, many animals will believe it really is the night and will start getting ready to go to sleep. Spiders might begin to break the webs they’ve spent the day building, while other creatures will go back to their dens.

It’s when the eclipse ends that the confusion really begins, and it’s been noted that many animals are restless in the aftermath. They won’t recover from the strange ordeal until the following day and they get a real night’s rest.

There are many stories dating back hundreds of years claiming other, far weirder things happen to animals during the eclipse – birds falling out of the sky, for instance. In recent years, we haven’t seen this happen, but birds have been noted to cause a lot more noise during an eclipse, as have frogs. Bats, too, will believe that night has fallen and will come out of their roosts, meaning you could see them flying around during the day when the eclipse ends.

One zoo in South Carolina even encouraged visitors to come on the day of the 2017 US eclipse and see exactly what the animals do. Unsurprisingly, there are lots of myths about eclipses from humans, too. We’ve understood eclipses for a long time. The ancient Babylonians were even able to predict them, as were the ancient Greeks with what might be the world’s first computer.

But that hasn’t stopped many pieces of folklore emerging as a result of their strangeness. Total darkness during the day is obviously something distressing if you don’t know what causes it, which plenty of people didn’t for thousands of years. That’s why many eclipse legends view a solar eclipse as a bad thing or a dark omen, with some explaining it as the sun being angry or feuding with the moon.

Even today such tales persist. It’s a common belief, particularly in India, that a solar eclipse could do harm to an unborn child if a pregnant woman doesn’t stay indoors during it. It’s also believed by some that any food made during the eclipse will be poisoned and have to be thrown away. Suffice it to say, neither of these claims has any scientific basis, but they’re still popular.

And it is true that an eclipse can be harmful; looking directly at it is just as bad as looking directly into the sun, despite it being dimmer. Everybody knows that looking into the sun can cause permanent damage to the eyes and shouldn’t be done.

What's your experience of this rare cosmic phenomena? Have you witnessed a solar eclipse before? While total eclipses are certainly uncommon, partial eclipses do take place every now and then... meaning that most of us should encounter something like this at some point in our lives. Above all else, perhaps these spectacular events most highlight the sheer immensity of space... and the quite beautiful balance that dictates how the solar system works.

Look up at the sky, any time, and consider that what you're peering into actually goes on and on for billions of lightyears. For forever, essentially. But still, every once in a while, two of the most massive bodies suspended in our sky - the two most important bodies, from our point of view, the sun and the moon can seamlessly align, causing the lights to go out on Earth.

When an eclipse does take place, it can only ever last for just a few moments at a time, before the swirling, speeding reality of space takes hold, and the Earth, sun and moon drift away again. But, for those few moments, everything is just right. In amongst the never-ending possibilities of space, everything perfectly lines up.

And that's pretty amazing, don't you think? Eclipses are strange and mysterious and cause all kinds of odd events both here on Earth and in space. And those were the five weirdest things that happen during a solar eclipse.

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