Eclipse

"Last Light"

The above image was taken on August 21st, 2017, from Jefferson City, Missouri, using a smartphone camera pressed against the eyepiece of my (properly filtered) 60mm Stellarvue refractor with a 9mm Televue Nagler eyepiece, just moments before totality. As stunning as this image is, it was NOTHING compared to the awe and wonder of totality. I had never seen anything like it, and the truly unbelievable sight of that jet black disk, looking like nothing so much as a hole in the universe, surrounded by the solar corona like a halo, was burned into my mind forever.

In the days and weeks following the eclipse, the internet was inundated by truly countless people expressing how they experienced an overwhelming sense of Oneness with the Universe, how they could feel the Earth, the Moon, planets, and the Sun spinning and moving through space in a Great Dance. More than one likened it to actually, physically hearing the Music of the Spheres.

And perhaps they were. For myself, my own feelings were mainly that I had not anticipated the beauty of the event. I had (mostly) anticipated the awe and wonder, but that it would be a Work of Art took me by surprise.

The "Belt of Venus"

Photo taken by my brother, Andrew Prokop, at sunset from the shore of Lake Superior.

The dark band just above the horizon is the Earth's shadow, just coming into view.

We think of eclipses (especially total solar eclipses) as super rare events, lasting at most a few brief minutes, and that one had to travel great distances to see. But have you ever realized that we (each and every one of us) experience a total solar eclipse every day? For just what is an eclipse? It is one celestial body passing in front of the Sun. A solar eclipse is the Moon passing in front of the Sun as seen from the Earth. A lunar eclipse is the Earth passing in front of the Sun from the vantage point of the Moon. But what is night? Is it not the Earth getting between us and the Sun? The fact that we are standing on the Earth's surface does not change that fact.

The Apollo astronauts marveled at finding "space" to be not cold and dark, as we are apt to think of it, but rather basking in an eternal noon. Michael Collins, Apollo 11 Command Module Pilot, perhaps expressed this feeling the best (in his memoirs, Carrying the Fire):

"As the radio commercial describes sunset: "When the sun just goes away from the sky..." Baloney. The sun doesn't rise or fall: it doesn't move, it just sits there, and we rotate in front of it. Dawn means we are rotating around into sight of it, while dusk means that we have turned another 180 degrees and are being carried into the shadow zone. The sun never "goes away from the sky." It's still there sharing the same sky with us; it's simply that there's a chunk of opaque earth between us and the sun which prevents our seeing it. Everyone knows that, but I really see it now. No longer do I drive down a highway and wish the blinding sun would set; instead I wish we could speed up our rotation a bit and swing around into the shadows more quickly."

A similar sentiment was expressed as far back as 1938, in C.S. Lewis' science fiction novel, Out of the Silent Planet. The novel's hero, Dr. Ransom, has been kidnapped by the evil scientist Dr. Weston, and carried off against his will in a spacecraft to an unknown celestial destination. Shortly after waking up aboard the ship, Ransom wonders aloud about how bright it is outside the window:

"I had always thought space was dark and cold," [Ransom] remarked vaguely.

"Forgotten the sun?" said Weston contemptuously. 

Ransom went on eating for some time. The he began, "If it's like this in the early morning," and stopped, warned by the expression on Weston's face. Awe fell on him: there were no mornings here, no evenings, and no night - nothing but the changeless noon which had filled for centuries beyond history so many millions of cubic miles.

And so we have the opportunity, without having to fly to the Moon, to viscerally experience our motion through space every single day. For me, the Earth's motion is most evident in the last minutes just prior to sunset, sitting on my back patio in shadow, while the tops of the trees in my neighbor's yard are still in bright sunshine. I realize that I am poised on the knife's edge of daylight. From space, from an observer on the Moon, I would be smack on the terminator, moving at approximately 700 mph into the Earth's night side.

I believe it is important to not just intellectually understand our place in the universe, but to feel it in our bones. I don't often manage to do this. I know I've succeeded when at a star party, the stars no longer seem to be above me, but rather in front of me. Try it sometime. Word of warning however - it can make you dizzy.

Fragility

Earthrise from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

For the second time in two years, I was hospitalized with a life threatening leg infection. I'm home now, but an enforced idleness of several days gives one time (and motivation) for Deep Thought. Upon discharge, I was told to expect to be back within a year or so unless I take active steps to prevent such a thing. It seems my body's immune system is irreparably compromised from my 20 plus year long losing struggle against diabetes. My sole defense against bacterial infection is my skin, and I am vulnerable to the smallest crack in that very thin layer of protection. The culprit this time around was an insignificant cut on one of my toes, so minor that I (incorrectly) assumed a simple band-aid would suffice.

(Be patient, this will get around to astronomy before I'm done.)

So now I walk around with an acute awareness of how fragile my safety is. It is quite literally "skin deep"! I must carry with me a tube of prescription strength antibiotic cream to apply ASAP to any cut, scrape, or puncture anywhere on my body, or else it's back to the hospital.

So I gave a lot of thought to just how fragile my health is, and how easily the apple cart could be upset, so to speak. Such thoughts were doubly a propos in the midst of the ongoing pandemic. For the health of our planet is equally vulnerable.

Earthrise from Japanese Kayuga space probe

We're learning from the armada of orbiters, landers, and rovers on and about Mars that that planet was "once upon a time" warm, wet, and quite possibly green, with an atmosphere approaching Terrestrial density blanketing its surface. Mars's northern hemisphere was almost entirely covered with an ocean containing enough water to fill our Atlantic. Rivers ran freely. We see even today their channels, flood plains, dendritic networks, and ancient deltas. Yes... "once upon a time", but long, long gone.

What happened? The atmosphere is what happened. It seems that the lack of a sufficiently powerful magnetic field laid the Martian surface naked to the full fury of billions of years of solar radiation, which little by little stripped the defenseless planet of its protective layer of air, causing most of its water to break down into its component atoms, which then flew merrily off into interplanetary space. (Hmm.. I just had a thought. I wonder how much of that water ended up here on Earth? Does my bottle of Fiji Water contain a bit o' the Red Planet?)

Did a rich and flourishing Martian ecosystem perish billions of years ago because it was stripped of that all too vulnerable protective screen? Just how knife-edged is the narrow path along which life progresses?

And what about us?

The original "Earthrise" photo, taken from Apollo 8

We are dumping carbon dioxide into our atmosphere at a rate that natural corrective processes are incapable of keeping up with. Equilibrium has not only been shattered, it has been stomped on, kicked into a corner, and beaten senseless. That, along with the other filth we pour into the air, threatens the very continued existence of Humanity, unless we come to our senses TODAY.

Take a good look at the Earthrise photos I've attached to this posting. Every time I see such an image, I can't help but marvel, not only at the heartbreaking beauty of our home world, but at its fragility. It's like a soap bubble suspended in space, perilously easy to pop.

Perhaps this coronavirus pandemic is a blessing in disguise. (A very good disguise, I must say.) In addition to our air becoming (temporarily, I fear) much cleaner, and our species' carbon footprint much reduced, it has exposed how fragile and unsustainable our economy is, and how radical income inequality is eating away at the foundations of our society. Even in "good" times, the poor and marginalized suffer disproportionately from hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and climate change in general, but in times of severe continental (indeed global) stress such as now, the result is inconvenience for the wealthy and catastrophe for the not so well off. Also, those who thought themselves safely ensconced in the Middle Class are finding they were only a paycheck or two away from financial ruin.

Fragility, fragility, fragility. Not just for our planet, but also for each and every one of us. (Forgive my digressions. I warned you, I had a lot of time on my hands.)

We have before us two alternatives, We can either use this calamity as a chance to reexamine the fundamentals of our economic and societal structures and rebuild so as to eliminate our ecologically destructive industrial habits, income inequality, and the lack of adequate healthcare and social safety net, or... we can emerge with a thoughtless resumption of our planet-destroying economy, and millions of families reduced to poverty and/or crushing lifelong debt from which they will have no hope of ever getting out from under.

Now, while the economy is basically shut down and the entire country is essentially under house arrest is the time to make the perilous knife's edge that we stand on abundantly clear to all. But this opportunity is fleeting. Once the economy starts up again, people will (understandably) be grateful for whatever crumbs are tossed in their direction.

The Earth and Moon, hanging in the Void