Cheering a Total Solar Eclipse
Video Credit & Copyright:
Associated Press,
Exploratorium
What would you do if you saw the Sun disappear?
Quite possibly: cheer.
That's what many exuberant sky watchers did across
Indonesia during a total
eclipse of the Sun last week.
There and then, the land and sky
went dark during the day as
our Sun disappeared for a few minutes behind our Moon.
Many people watching knew they were witnessing a rare event, and their joyous exclamations can be heard on the
featured video.
What a far cry this reaction is from
centuries ago,
when more typical
eclipse reactions derived from
fear and
worry.
The video shows first shows a Sun only
partly eclipsed by the Moon as totality approached.
From many locations,
foreground clouds on our Earth either obscured the view or made the view
more interesting.
The total eclipse was only visible from a
narrow swath of Earth that included several Indonesian islands.
At the same time, in the opposite direction,
NASA's
EPIC camera aboard
NOAA's
DSCOVR satellite captured the
shadow of the Moon
moving across the Earth.