Eclipse!

Did you see the recent total solar eclipse? Eclipses are really incredible! Find out why in this episode.

Listen on Podbean:

Listen on YouTube:

A few notes:

In the episode I mention Horatio Cushman. I should have read more about him before speaking, but you can read about him here if you like. He was not Choctaw, but he lived in the same area and wrote a major history of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Natchez, published in 1899.

The Archilochus quote comes from this page.

I found the audio clip of the eclipse here (really a video):  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2017_Total_Solar_Eclipse_with_Audience_Reaction.webm#filelinks. This is the license that allows me to use it: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Music: Jens East — Daybreak (ft. Henk) www.soundcloud.com/jenseast
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution V4.0

Transcription (remember, this is a direct transcription of what I said and is not actually how I write!):

Welcome to 9 Minutes of Wonder. I’m Betsy Hedberg. I hope that this podcast will help you rekindle your sense of wonder for this awe-inspiring world.

If you like what you hear in the next few minutes, please subscribe and share.

[audio clip plays]

Oh my god, that was so cool. Every time I listen to that audio, I just love it.

That was from the 2017 Total Solar Eclipse. It was a group of people in Oregon who didn’t know each other at all until they ended up in the same place to watch the eclipse together. Eclipses really bring people together, which I love.

And I know you can’t see me right now, but I’m wearing my black t-shirt that says, “Total Eclipse, Where were you when the lights went down? August 21st, 2017, Torrington, Wyoming.” So I was there in Torrington, Wyoming on that day, and there was a total eclipse, and it was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen in my life.

There was a total eclipse on the 8th of April, 2024. This time, I didn’t see it at all. I’m living in Europe, and I was in Italy, and I ended up being disappointed because I went through the whole day not even thinking about the eclipse. Then I went out to dinner not thinking about the eclipse, and I got back from dinner, and I thought, oh my gosh, the eclipse is happening right now. And I wanted to watch the CNN coverage, and I couldn’t watch it because my hotel didn’t get CNN, which is usually fine. I don’t need that on vacation, for sure. But this time, I was, ah, I felt kind of disappointed.

And the hotel had really bad internet, so I couldn’t even watch it on the internet, really. So I missed the whole thing, which was a shame because I love seeing pictures of people watching the eclipse. And I also think all the build-up, it’s just, it’s really exciting.

So even if you didn’t see the total eclipse this year, you must have seen pictures of people watching it. And did you notice their expressions? Because everyone looks at a total solar eclipse in awe, especially if they’re not fiddling with their phones trying to take a picture of it, but just standing there and watching it, which is how I recommend doing it. And that’s why I wanted to watch the coverage, but I also loved looking at the photos.

A friend of mine said that she went with her 20-year-old son and his friends at their university to watch the eclipse, because the eclipse — the path of totality — went right by the campus. And even those 20-year-old guys were all in awe. And that might be my favorite thing about eclipses, is how they unite people.

And they give people, even for a very brief moment, a chance to forget that they’re trying to be cool. And they also give people a chance to forget that they’re supposed to disagree with each other or they’re supposed to hate each other or whatever. They’re not supposed to, but they do anyway.

But maybe for just a few minutes, that eclipse makes everybody forget. So I think that’s really nice.

The History Guy has a YouTube channel. He did an eclipse episode this year, but he talked about the eclipse of 1918. He quotes the Tulsa Morning News at that time in 1918 as saying, “No one can behold an eclipse without a feeling of awe.” And I totally agree with that.

I hope you do too, if you’ve had a chance to see one. The obviously awe-inspiring thing about a total solar eclipse is that it looks like night in the middle of day, which, you know, is weird. And it’s nothing like when it gets really cloudy and there’s going to be a big storm.

It’s even darker than that. It really is like night, or I should say more like twilight. So you can see 360 degrees around you, that it looks like the sun has set quite a while ago or is going to rise in a while.

Although that’s, I don’t see sunrises very often, but I’ve seen a lot of sunsets. And the sun, when it’s totally eclipsed by the moon, has these beams of light coming out of it, but it’s otherwise black. And as you probably also know, it gets noticeably cooler and you can see electric lights around you.

So when I was in Wyoming, a train went by just at the time of totality and we saw the lights coming out of the train. It was nice. And you can also hear birds suddenly singing their evening songs sometimes.

And dogs, yeah, dogs like to bark when there’s an eclipse. I imagine they think it’s pretty strange too.

What else is incredible about eclipses? Of course, these days they’re so predictable, but I like to imagine just, I don’t know, living a thousand years ago, two thousand years ago, just going about my business, having no idea that there was going to be an eclipse. And it’s kind of hard to imagine, right? But that’s how it used to be, of course. So I’m walking behind my donkey with a plow or other things I might have been doing in those days, milking the cow, whatever. And all of a sudden it gets weirdly dark. That must have been really freaky for people.

I wanted to talk about a few specific eclipses from ancient times, and I did some research about them, but it just made me more confused because there’s all sorts of contradictory information about dates and whether something really was an eclipse or maybe it was a Sahara dust storm or something else that darkened the sky midday. It’s really hard to find scientific consensus about, you know, matching ancient resources with particular eclipses, and even sometimes the years would be off.

And then, not to mention the various instances of the sky darkening in the Bible. Those instances are not clearly eclipses, but they could have been, or they could just be stuff that was made up to tell a particular story in the Bible. So I’m not even going to go there, but I can definitely say that before people understood and accepted astronomical science, eclipses were seen as supernatural events instigated by the gods and often coming as bad omens.

I did find an interesting article on the website Choctaw Nation. I’ll share a link here. It was talking about how Choctaw communities used to react to eclipses, and apparently there was an observer, I don’t think he was Choctaw, but his name was Horatio Cushman, and he claimed to have seen Choctaw people respond to more than one total solar eclipse, describing women shouting and banging metal pots together, dogs barking, and men calmly shooting their guns toward the sun to scare away the black squirrels that people believed were very hungry and were therefore trying to eat the sun. And of course they successfully scared away the black squirrels, so that worked.

But the article talks about how other Choctaw communities thought of the solar eclipse as the sun’s cleansing itself to be able to continue its important work, or possibly as the sun resting for a little while.

There is one ancient eclipse that I will share. It took place on the 6th of April, either in 647 or 648 BC, depending on the source. The Greek poet Archilochus wrote about this eclipse:

“After this, man can believe anything, expect anything. Don’t any of you be surprised in future if land beasts change places with dolphins and go to live in their salty pastures and get to like the sounding waves of the sea more than the land, while the dolphins prefer the mountains.”

So after an eclipse happened, anything was possible. If the gods can send something that powerful to overcome the sun, they can do a lot of other things too.

Another thing I was thinking, just to wrap it up: we might keep in mind that although an eclipse is an awesome phenomenon from our perspective, in a way things really aren’t that different when there’s not an eclipse. I mean, it’s totally different. It looks totally different. It’s a totally different experience than a normal day. But we still see the same sun and the same moon just lined up in an unusual way during an eclipse.

So therefore, when we notice the sun and the moon outside of an eclipse, which is obviously almost all the time, we can still take a moment to think about how incredible they both are, even though we might see them nearly every day and completely take them both for granted most of the time.

I’ll leave you with a little bit more audio from that exciting 2017 eclipse in Oregon and talk to you soon.

[audio clip plays] “That was awesome. That was incredible.”

 

Scroll to Top