bang, giving birth to an endless
expanding existence of time, space, and matter. Every day, new discoveries
are unlocking the mysterious, the mind blowing, the deadly
secrets of a place we call the universe. A total eclipse. The brilliant sun suddenly
obliterated by the black disk of the moon. You can see this eyeball
looking down at you. NARRATOR: Both breathtaking and
frightening, eclipses warn us of powerful solar storms that
may fulfill an ancient prophecy of chaos on Earth in 2012. People would freak out. We wouldn't have refrigeration. We wouldn't have lights. NARRATOR: Eclipses
of distant stars are now revealing new
planets, even other Earths. Some of them just
popped right out at us. NARRATOR: The search
covers the entire universe, but it begins here on Earth
as the sun hides its face in total eclipse. It's a spectacle in the sky
that has enthralled human beings for thousands of years, a
totally clips of the sun. Few people who see one
will ever forget it. ALEX FILIPPENKO:
Personally witnessing a total solar
eclipse in the flesh is an amazing, awe inspiring,
tremendously moving experience. I've never experienced
anything quite like it. NARRATOR: Some, like
astronomer Glenn Schneider, are part of a subculture
of globe hopping eclipse chasers who
will go anywhere, any time to see an eclipse. GLENN SCHNEIDER: It grips you,
because the sky has gone dark. Not as dark as midnight, but
like a very deep Twilight. And you can see this
eyeball looking down at you. The black disk where the sun was
is the silhouette of the moon. It's an experience that you
can't believe it was only a minute or two minutes. It seems to have lasted
a lifetime, and also, just an instant. NARRATOR: This compelling
event is a launching pad for cosmic exploration, solving
a string of mysteries that have puzzled mankind for ages. What makes the sun
disappear without warning? When does it happen? How can we predict it? Can we make it happen ourselves? Once understood, we find that
each eclipse reveals something new about the universe. Even now, we're finding
our newest eclipses around distant stars,
revealing extra solar plants. Some perhaps twins to the Earth
with the potential for life. The story begins with the
mystery of our own eclipses. A sun suddenly vanishing
in broad daylight. Visible since before
recorded history, the ancients regarded
eclipses with wonder and fear. The ancient people didn't
understand physically what was going on
during a solar eclipse. They would see a progressively
bigger bite being taken out of the sun as though some
gods or dragons were eating the sun, mad at those people. So the people would
beat pots and pans, and yell and scream,
and sacrifice virgins, and all sorts of things
to appease the gods and scare the dragons away. And you know what? It worked every time. NARRATOR: Through thousands
of years, patiently watching the movements of the
sun and moon in the sky, ancient astronomers
realized eclipses happen when the moon passed
directly in front of the sun. In time, scholars studied
the patterns of eclipses long enough to predict them. The Babylonians discovered
what's called the Saros cycle more than 22 centuries ago. The Saros cycle is a cycle of
eclipses that repeat every 223 months, roughly, every
18 years, and they're very similar to one another. NARRATOR: The Greeks were aware
of the Babylonian discovery as we've learned from the
remarkable Antikythera mechanism, an ancient
device found on a shipwreck under the Mediterranean
Sea in 1981. The Antikythera
mechanism was first thought to be some
sort of a clock and then some sort
of celestial timer. It was a very complex
mechanism with many gears, and layers, and planes. NARRATOR: Archeologists
have been intrigued by the Antikythera mechanism
ever since it was found. Decades ago, they understood
it was a mechanical computer for calculating movements of
the planets, phases of the moon, and other astronomical
phenomena. But the latest discovery
astounded them. In 2008, using 3D
x-rays and CT scans, they found that the
Babylonian Saros cycle was built in to the device. In two of the back
plates of the mechanism was inscribed a spiral like
figure that had divisions that when you added them up
corresponded to the months in a Saros cycle. The only reason to have the
Saros built into the mechanism was if it was an eclipse
predictor as well. NARRATOR: A total
eclipse of the sun can be seen somewhere on
Earth an average of once every 16 months. Today, predicting them
is a very exact science. The next total solar eclipse
to be visible from the United States will be on
August 21, 2017. NARRATOR: But modern
astronomers can do much better than supplying the
date for an eclipse. An eclipse map shows the exact
path along which people can see the 2017 total eclipse, and the
timing is down to the second. It will reach totality at
10:17 plus 18 seconds AM in Salem, Oregon, at
1:15:55 seconds PM in St. Louis, Missouri, and
2:41:55 seconds in Columbia, South Carolina. It will cross the country in
one hour, 31 minutes, and 1.6 seconds along a path
averaging 66 miles wide. With information so exact,
anyone who wants to see it will be able to. People will have
an opportunity to get to the path of totality
from all over the United States. That's an opportunity that
everybody should really try to take, because they
are few and far between. Here it comes. Here it comes. NARRATOR: Apart from the
spectacular visible picture, the blocked sun
also gives viewers the chills in a literal sense. During a total solar
eclipse, the temperature can drop as much as 35 degrees. That, of course, is nothing
compared to the temperatures in outer space, where all
the action is taking place. How cold can the universe get? That's what Carlo
of Boulder, Colorado wanted to ask the universe,
so he e-mailed us. What is the current
temperature of the universe, and why is it so cold? Carlo, that's a
really cool question if you'll pardon my pun. Here near the sun, we feel warm. But in outer space, the
temperature of the universe is only three degrees
above absolute zero. It's really cold. It's that cold, because
the universe can be thought of as an expanding gas. And it's been expanding and
cooling for 14 billion years. NARRATOR: The reason total
eclipses are few and far between is the result of
a delicate astronomical interplay. It depends on a moon that's an
average of about 240,000 miles away and 1/4 the
diameter of the Earth. HOLLY GILBERT: To demonstrate
just how difficult it is to get two objects to
align just right to create an eclipse, I'm going to
use this ping pong ball representing the Earth
and this very small marble representing the moon. This is so small that I have
to hold it in tweezers for you to be able to see. Now, the Earth and the moon are
located about this far apart in space, and it makes
it very difficult for them to align just
right with the sun to create an eclipse as
I'm going to demonstrate. It's very difficult to get
these to align just right for an eclipse to occur. But once I do, I can see a fuzzy
shadow on this ping pong ball. That looks very much like
the beautiful photographs of solar eclipses from space. NARRATOR: The large
fuzzy part of the shadow is called the penumbra. If you're standing in the
penumbra during an eclipse, the sun is not
completely covered, and you see a partial eclipse. The small, dark, central part of
the shadow is called the umbra. If you're standing in it, the
sun is completely covered, and you see the total eclipse. Because of the moon's
motion in its orbit, the umbra moves
across the Earth, tracing a clear line called
the path of totality, the only place where a true
totally clips is visible. The width of the umbra is
typically under 100 miles, so you really have to position
yourself carefully in order to see a totally eclipsed sun. And seeing a 97% or 98%
eclipse is nowhere near seeing a 100% eclipse sun. You've got to be in
the path of totality. NARRATOR: There is much more
to the Eclipse phenomenon than just the sun and the moon. The story reaches
across the universe, because eclipses do
happen everywhere. An eclipse occurs
whenever one object passes between us and another
object, cutting off its light. NARRATOR: Virtually, all
other planets with moons will also have solar eclipses,
whether they occur here in our own solar system
or around other stars and across the entire
expanse of space. But what can this eye
candy of the cosmos teach us about the universe? How is it possible that a
simple eclipse on the Earth can prove that the bizarre
distortions of space and time predicted by Albert Einstein
are essentially correct? Our search for total
eclipses begins with what we witness from the Earth. In space, satellites
use eclipses of our sun to watch for disasters, like
the fabled solar storms of 2012. But farther out in the
cosmos, our explorations reveal that there are
eclipses everywhere. Many of them, keys to unlocking
secrets of the universe. In the solar system, the
only planets without eclipses are Mercury and Venus. Because they have no moons. Currently, there is about 170
known moons orbiting planets in our solar system. Now, that number
keeps on growing. Saturn and Jupiter each have
at least 60 known moons. But as we get better
and better data, additional small
moons are being found. So I think there are hundreds
of moons in the solar system. NARRATOR: In most
cases, the moons are too small to block
the full disk of the sun. Mars is a good example. Taken from the surface
by the Opportunity Rover, these NASA photos show
the Martian moon Phobos as it moves across the sun. It turns out that the
eclipses we see here on Earth are like no others. ADAM FRANK: In order to
get the kind of eclipse that we have here on Earth,
where it's a total eclipse, but the moon just
fits over the sun, so that you can see the corona
and how dramatic that is requires a remarkable
alignment of size and distance. NARRATOR: It amounts
to a coincidence of cosmic proportions. The sun is about 400 times
bigger than the moon, but the sun also happens
to be about 400 times farther away from the
Earth than the moon. What that means is that
both the sun and the moon appear to be almost exactly
the same size in the sky. Their sizes in the sky
are crucial for eclipses. Suppose this ball
represents the sun, and the small red ball
represents the moon. To get a total
solar eclipse, they have to be perfectly
lined up with each other and with the Earth. Now, in this case, the moon
is too far from the Earth, so it looks too small to
fully cover the sun's disk. But as I bring the moon
closer to the Earth, the moon looks
bigger and bigger. Now, eventually, the moon
is close enough to the Earth that it perfectly
covers the sun's disk. That's a perfect
total solar eclipse. NARRATOR: What are the chances
that this remarkable alignment would happen on a planet at
just the time in its history when an intelligent species
has evolved to witness and wonder about the results? It's interesting to speculate
whether any other intelligent beings in our Milky
Way galaxy experienced such beautiful, perfect
total solar eclipses. It's really quite possible
that we may be the only intelligent species in
the entire universe that has this kind of alignment,
because it is so specific. NARRATOR: And while
ancient humans once dreaded solar eclipses
for hiding the sun, another kind of eclipse
helped to answer what was once a fundamental question. Is the Earth flat,
or is it round? The puzzle was solved when
the Earth and moon went into a celestial role reversal. The result was a lunar eclipse. By watching the shadow of
the Earth pass across the moon, the ancients were
able to actually see that the shadow was curved. Therefore, they were able to
infer that since the shadow was curved, the Earth itself
must also be spherical. NARRATOR: The
curvature is prominent when only part of the Earth's
shadow passes across the moon. But when the moon is entirely
shadowed by the Earth, the lunar eclipse is total. A total lunar eclipse
occurs when the moon passes within the shadow
cast by the Earth, so the moon is completely
in the shadow of the Earth. Everyone from the
dark side of the Earth can see the totally
eclipsed moon. That means a vast population
can see a lunar eclipse, whereas only a small
number of people can see a total solar eclipse. NARRATOR: Lunar eclipses
also helped scientists learn about the scattering of light. In a total lunar eclipse,
the moon turns red orange. It is in the Earth's shadow,
but some light from the sun scatters through the atmosphere. The light passing through a
great distance of atmosphere turns red just as
it does on Earth when the sun is on the horizon. The light travels through
its greatest thickness of atmosphere and creates
a red sunrise or sunset. In fact, every kind
of eclipse has much to teach us about the
science of the universe. In the early 20th
century, one solar eclipse witnessed at the White
House by President Coolidge gave us the first confirmation
of a prediction made by a young scientist
named Albert Einstein. In 1919, the astronomer
Arthur Eddington went to the location of
a total solar eclipse to test a prediction of
Einstein's general theory of relativity. NARRATOR: In 1915, Einstein
published his prediction that gravity causes space to
curve, and the light from stars would bend following that curve. So if there were a star
close to the sun in the sky, its light would be bent
by the sun's gravity. The only way to test
Einstein's prediction was during an eclipse
when the sun was darkened and the nearby
stars were visible. Eddington knew the accurate
position of a star that should have been blocked by the sun. But if the sun's gravity bent
the star's light, as Einstein said, it would be seen as if
it were in a different position altogether. Eddington measured that. He saw that, thus,
confirming for the first time a prediction of Einstein's
general theory of relativity. NARRATOR: But the greatest
scientific benefit of total solar
eclipses is the view they give us of the sun's
corona, which is otherwise invisible to us. Without the occurrence
of total solar eclipses, it's really questionable today
whether we would actually even know that the
sun had a corona, an outer, hot,
tenuous atmosphere. The solar disk
is a million times brighter than the
surrounding corona. So if you don't
block that out, you can't visibly see the corona. For us to be able to observe
the corona is important, Because otherwise,
we wouldn't know that this layer of
the solar atmosphere extends out into space. In fact, we're embedded here on
Earth in the solar atmosphere and the extended solar corona. NARRATOR: For more than three
centuries after the invention of the telescope, astronomers
rushes to far flung locations all over the world just to
spend a few minutes observing, studying, and analyzing
the mysterious corona. And it stayed that way,
until the technological leap that gave mankind the power
to make its own eclipses. These artificial
eclipses revealed something totally unexpected,
the eruptions in space. It turned out to be the greatest
explosions in the solar system. Eclipses of every
kind have proven to be keys to unlocking many
of the secrets scattered across the universe. Eclipses reveal planets circling
distant stars and solar storms posing dangers to worth
worse than we can imagine. The sun's threats are
hidden in the corona, which appears on Earth only
during a total eclipse. It happens only once
every 16 months, on average, at places scattered
across the entire globe. Not nearly enough for
monitoring such a deadly hazard. Out in space, though,
satellites send us up to the minute
pictures of the sun. Spectacular space probes
show the solar corona in all its glory and never ever
have to wait for an eclipse. Their secret is a
piece of technology that creates a manmade eclipse. Let's say, I want to
look at the sun, which is right next to me here. The sun is really
bright, and it scatters lots of light in the sky. So much so that I can't
see what's around it. But if I use a device,
like an occluder that an optician
might use, I can use it to block the
sunlight, kill the glare, and see what's around the sun. I could do the same
thing with stars, and a device like that,
that we can put together, is called a corona graph. We use it for studying
the sun's corona, and we use it for studying
the environments of stars. NARRATOR: Corona
graphs invented in 1939 were first applied to
telescopes on Earth. They worked best at
the highest altitudes, where a scattering of sunlight
by the atmosphere is minimized. But corona graphs do their
heaviest lifting in space. Two of the major missions
carrying corona graphs are the Soho and
Stereo spacecraft. They photograph the corona
out to great distances and pick up other phenomena
that without these artificial eclipses would be
totally unseen. Movies of the sun
obtained by satellites are really fascinating to watch. Because you can see
all sorts of changes in the structure of the corona,
and prominence's, and flares, and things like that. And you can also see what's
called sun grazing comets, comets that come in
and nearly hit the sun, but go whizzing past. They're too close to the sun to
be visible during the nighttime or the daytime. But with the sun's disk blocked
out, you can actually see them. NARRATOR: In 1971, a
NASA satellite equipped with the corona graph snapped
these shots of something completely unknown. The grainy pictures revealed an
explosion in the corona no one had ever seen before. In 1971, it was discovered
with the corona graph on a satellite that the sun
sometimes undergoes what's called coronal mass ejections. Incredibly powerful explosions,
like billions of nuclear bombs going off, that eject high speed
charged particles from the sun. NARRATOR: The solar particles
speed toward the Earth, where they cause the beautiful
auroras, usually, seen near the poles. But they can also
seriously damage satellites, communications,
and power grids. Coronal mass ejections, or
CMEs, happen in the corona and are often linked
to solar flares, which happen on the sun's surface. These are currently the
most powerful explosions known in the solar system,
approaching the power of a billion hydrogen bonds. Corona mass ejections
involves so much mass and magnetic energy
moving away from the sun. They can be as wide as
almost half of the sun, and it's like a large
bubble of material and magnetic field
moving away from the sun at over four million
miles an hour. NARRATOR: The amount of solar
material ejected is huge. During a CME, mass equivalent
to 200,000 World War II battleships is thrown out
into space, 220 billion pounds of matter. October 2003. A powerful series of CMEs
erupts in the solar corona. One of the most intense
in recent memory, it generates auroras seen
as far South as Florida. It causes at least one
power blackout on Earth and affects more than half
of NASA's space missions. The Soho solar satellite
is briefly disabled, but records dramatic
pictures of the event. In the satellite images, you
can see the energetic particles hitting the detector,
and it looks like there's a bunch of snow. So we can actually see
the particles impacting the satellite itself. NARRATOR: But there may be more
danger in these solar storms than we suspect. We don't yet know how
often the big ones happen, but the latest research tells
us that the worst case scenario could smash the Earth with a
solar wind whose effects could kill millions. Across the depths of the cosmos,
whenever moons or planets cross paths with
stars, the result is an often revealing,
and sometimes, eye inspiring spectacle
of an eclipse. Here on Earth, man made
artificial eclipses have uncovered solar storms
of incomparable violence. It is critical that we watch
for coronal mass ejections, massive solar outbursts
discovered using corona graphs, blocking out the
disk of the sun. The greatest danger comes
when the solar sunspot cycle is at its maximum
roughly every 11 years. During the maximum
of solar activities, there might be two or three
coronal mass ejections per day. Whereas during a minimum in the
cycle, there might be only one per week. NARRATOR: Scientists
are on the lookout for the next solar
maximum, which some believe would come in 2012,
and that happens to be the year the Mayan
calendar comes to an end, which has given rise to
widespread speculation about a global
disaster in that year. In fact, it's now believed
the coming solar maximum will be the weakest
since 1928 and won't be reached until after 2012. Although precise dating is
beyond the realm of today's science. It is now predicted that the
next solar maximum will peak in probably early 2014. Some people predict it
will happen before that, but it's sort of
a moving target. Because we don't fully
understand the solar cycle itself. NARRATOR: Scientists
have long suspected that a super CME, when it does
happen, could be disastrous. The last such event
to target the Earth happened in 1859,
disrupting telegraph service and creating auroras
visible down to the equator. An event like that today would
mean power outages on a scale we've never experienced. Much of the US power grid
could be down for three months and perhaps much longer. If we lost electricity
for three months or more, the effects, especially
on a country like ours that depends on electricity
so much, would be devastating. You can only imagine
what it would be like. People would freak out really. I mean, we wouldn't
have refrigeration. We wouldn't have lights. NARRATOR: Without the
artificial eclipses in our solar satellites, we
would have no idea that such a threat even existed. According to recent
estimates, full recovery could take four to 10 years. Millions of people could
die due to shortages of food, clean water,
and pharmaceuticals. Projected damage, maybe as
much as $1 to $2 trillion, comparable to 20
hurricane Katrina's. A super CME struck the
year 150 years ago, but scientists disagree on
when the next one could come. The likelihood of that
happening in our lifetime is probably not that good,
but we just don't know. We don't have enough data. The most powerful
coronal mass ejections that could cause widespread
damage over all of Earth probably occur only about
once every millennium or so. Nevertheless, having a huge
calamity every few thousand years is really a big deal. NARRATOR: Our best
protection may be in the artificial
eclipses aboard spacecraft, monitoring the sun for CMEs. If improved warning
systems are put into place, we may have enough time to
shut down the electric grid to prevent it from
burning out, dodging the deadly bullet otherwise
aimed straight for us. A coronal mass ejection may be
the most spectacular phenomenon uncovered by eclipse
science, but the universe is full of other eclipses. Each one, teaching us something
else about the cosmos. Even a short hop into space,
no farther than the moon, turns the tables
on us as the Earth becomes the celestial
body to eclipse the sun. Think about how important
that Apollo 12 image was, where they turned the camera
back towards the Earth, and you could see the
Earth eclipsing the sun. Those images from
Apollo were really epic making for humanity. It gave us our first real
sense of the Earth as being an object floating in space. NARRATOR: Farther out,
the Cassini space probe looks at Saturn, virtually
black, surrounded by backlit rings as it blocks
out the disk of the sun nearly a billion miles away. A very different view of our
own moon eclipsing the sun comes from the
stereo B spacecraft. From deep space, the moon
appears much smaller, and it crosses the sun's disk
in what's called a transit. This kind of eclipse may
be pivotal in answering our questions about who else may
be out there in the universe. What makes
transit so important is it's one of our ways
of actually discovering what are called
extrasolar planets, planets orbiting other stars. NARRATOR: The
tantalizing possibility is tempered by the daunting
problem of actually making it work. Finding a planet transiting
in front of its star is like seeing a flea crawling
across an autos headlight, but science is rising
to the challenge. And new space telescopes trained
on the tiny eclipses that uncover planets around distant
stars are about to strike gold. After centuries of
wondering, the discovery of another Earth in
the depths of space is suddenly within reach. If the search for
eclipses starts with the most spectacular
examples here on Earth, turning our view out into
space reveals other eclipses. Not only in the solar
system, but far beyond were there key to
one of astronomy his hottest pursuits, the
hunt for extrasolar planets. GREG LAUGHLIN: A very important
kind of eclipse right now is the eclipse that occurs when
an extra solar planet, a planet orbiting another star, passes
in front of the parent star. It takes a very
sensitive telescope to detect that slight dimming. The most famous telescope
project right now is the Kepler Space Telescope
that is out there in space, looking at over
100,000 sun like stars and watching over
a period of years for the transits
of actually Earth like, Earth sized planets
going in front of those stars. NATALIE BATALHA: It'd be
great if we could find planets orbiting other stars by
simply pointing a telescope up into the sky and taking
a picture of one. But that's really tough. One of the reasons that
that's really tough is because the stars are about
10 million to 10 billion times brighter than the
planets that orbit them, and I can demonstrate
that really easily with this search light. When I turn it on, you see
that I become completely lost in the glare of this light
just as a planet is lost in the glare of the
star that it orbits. Kepler's job is to measure
the brightness of stars, just like we can do
with this light meter and our simulated star
with the search like. NARRATOR: This is how eclipses
figure into the mission. The light meters needle
dips when something passes in front of
the searchlight, creating an eclipse. Kepler does the same
thing, but is so sensitive, it can detect a dip of
20 parts per million. Kepler is capable of
detecting an Earth sized planet around a sun like star
in the habitable zone, so a real Earth sun analog. That's what Kepler
is capable of doing, and it's the first
mission that's capable of doing exactly that. NARRATOR: Kepler is trained
on an area of the galaxy containing about 150,000 stars,
and it monitors every one of them constantly, measuring
each star's brightness every 30 minutes, hoping to detect
those minute eclipses caused by planets around some of them. Just a small
fraction of them will be in the right
position for us to see their planetary transits. Most of the stars in the sky
that have planetary systems don't undergo transits. It's only if we have a lucky
chance alignment, where the orbital plane of the planet
is along our line of sight or contains our line
of sight to the Earth that we can actually see
when the planet goes in front of the star and dims out
some of the stars light. NARRATOR: The very distant
combination of light and shadow produces for each transit a
telltale light curve showing the dip in brightness
as the planet crosses in front of its sun. Kepler produced results after
only a few months on the job. We looked at our very
first light curves. We could see
transits immediately. I mean, some of them just
popped right out at us. The spacecraft was
performing flawlessly. The data was beautiful. Right out of the gate, we were
reaching the precision levels very close to what we
expected at the beginning. NARRATOR: In January
2010, the Kepler team announced the discovery of the
mission's first five planets. Four are gas giants,
like Jupiter. The fifth, the size of Neptune. Kepler saw their
transits many times in its first weeks of searching. It means they orbit their
stars in a matter of days, eclipsing their stars each time. These things are closer
to their parents star, about 10 times closer
to their parent star than mercury is to our sun, and
Mercury is the closest planet to our sun. NARRATOR: But one of
Kepler's ultimate goals is to find Earth like planets
around sun like stars, and that takes longer since
they will orbit on timescales, like our own, once a year. An Earth like planet
around a sun like star is going to produce a dimming
of one part per 10,000, so it's a very tiny signal. If it's in the habitable
zone, that signal, the transit is going
to last 12 hours and would repeat
once every year. Not once every three days,
so you have to stare. You have to have stability. You stare for a whole year,
and you wait for an event that happens and lasts 12 hours. And it's very, very tiny,
one part per 10,000. NARRATOR: When Kepler spots
the right kind of light curve, large telescopes on
the ground follow up. They take additional
measurements to be sure the eclipses
are caused by planets. It means weeding
through a lot of data. As of June 2010, we had
approximately 700 planet candidates. NARRATOR: The confirmation
work now being done by ground telescopes
is painfully slow and will continue for
months and years to come. As the process continues,
Kepler's planet list is expected to grow to dozens
soon, and later, hundreds. Measuring Kepler's success
rate is guesswork, but as many as 50% or more of its
candidates may turn out to be actual planets. Kepler will search for tiny
eclipses for as long as six years, accumulating a census
of planets in our galaxy more complete than
any compiled so far. Kepler is going to determine
if Earth like planets are common or rare, and
the answer either way is going to be very interesting. If it turns out
that they're rare, that speaks to how special
we are in the galaxy. However, if we have reason
to believe that they're going to be frequent, I think we're
all kind of closet optimists that they're going
to be very common. But we don't know. We don't have the answer yet. NARRATOR: In this, the
discovery of Earth like planets around other stars, eclipses
will be the tools making it possible. Far removed from
the sensory thrill that the chasers seek in
witnessing the moon block out our sun, eclipses in
deep space may lead us to the ultimate knowledge
of our place in the cosmos by blocking out the light
from some of the most luminous objects in creation. It is as if we are screening
out the deafening noise and are now hearing only the
secret and revealing whispers of the universe.
