By a lucky coincidence, the moon and the sun appear to be almost the same size, each subtending about half a degree of arc in diameter. As a result, the endless and repetitive wobbly dance of the worlds causes the moon to pass directly in front of the sun every year or two, sometimes hiding it completely in a total solar eclipse.
Typically, the people on some barely inhabited stretch of land or ocean a few hundred miles wide and a few thousand miles long are treated to a few minutes of noontime darkness. The sun is replaced by an inky hole in the sky surrounded by the feathery glow of the corona, a halo of superheated gas that surrounds it. The landscape turns caramel. Winds blow, the temperature falls apocalyptically, and wildlife go crazy.
Friday’s solar eclipse was no different. The shadow of the moon crossed over the North Atlantic Ocean and into the Arctic. The only places on land where the eclipse was total were the Faroe Islands and Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago. People and spooked animals in Europe, Russia and North Africa saw a partial eclipse.
Waiting for it in Svalbard, as he has for 58 eclipses of various kinds dating back to 1959, was Jay M. Pasachoff, an astronomer and director of Hopkins Observatory at Williams College, and a team of colleagues supported in part by National Geographic. Dr. Pasachoff is an expert on the corona, one of the sun’s most exotic but bashful features. Its pearly light is less than a millionth as bright as the sun itself and thus is visible only during those rare instances when the moon completely covers the sun.
He’s seen eclipses from ships and airplanes and camps on the ground on every continent including Antarctica, from Easter Island to New England. In 2009, he blogged for this newspaper about an eclipse in China that was to be the longest of this decade.
“We’re here for the science, yes,” Dr. Pasachoff wrote in 2010 from Easter Island. “But there’s also the primal thrill this astronomical light show always brings — the perfect alignment, in solemn darkness, of the celestial bodies that mean most to us.”
Dr. Pasachoff wrote recently from Oslo, where he and his wife, Naomi, were getting ready to go north to Svalbard, a former whaling base that is halfway between Norway and the North Pole. Thousands of tourists gathered there ahead of the eclipse, including one man who suffered minor injuries when a polar bear attacked him inside a tent Thursday, according to Reuters.
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