Whats so special about a total eclipse of the Sun?
If you’ve ever seen a solar eclipse on television or seen pictures in a book, dismiss those images. They don’t begin to tell the story. If that’s all there were to the event, there wouldn’t be tens of thousands of people traveling across countries and continents to get to the eclipse. Everyone would watch it on the evening news. Here’s a brief overview of what the TV images cannot show you. The partial eclipse begins about an hour before the total eclipse. During that period, the silhouette of the Moon starts to pass in front of the disc of the Sun. If you look toward the bright Sun through a protective filter, you can see by eye that the black outline of the Moon’s disc is creeping across the Sun’s disc very gradually. All around you, the air takes on a strange hue and an eeriness that is not seen under any other conditions. As the eclipse advances, all of nature senses the change. Birds come to roost, cocks will crow, and all manner of animals and plants revert to their nighttime pos
