Long ago, when the skies darkened under a solar eclipse, our ancestors shot arrows at the sky and banged drums to scare away the dragon who was eating the Sun. Today we’ve traded the hungry dragon theory of eclipses for the understanding that eclipses are perfectly natural phenomenon involving synchronized path crossings of the Sun, Moon and Earth. We have wrested this much from the corridors of superstition. The evolution of our understanding of eclipses is a victory of light over darkness and we should celebrate it.
At the same time, the atmosphere generated by eclipses is just as uncanny as it ever was. Just ask anyone who has been called from sleep in the middle of the night to stare up at a lunar eclipse, or who has witnessed the eerie progression of a solar eclipse turning day into night. The sense of being under a magically altered sky during an eclipse is just as real today as it ever was. Although we now know the how and why of an eclipse, there is much that remains a mystery about these cyclical interruptions of light.
