I’ve always been amazed that total solar eclipses are possible. The sun, an 870,000-mile-wide ball of gas over 90 million miles away from us gets completely blocked by the moon, a 2,100-mile-wide ball of rock 240,000 miles away. If the sun were a bit bigger or closer, or if the moon were a bit smaller or farther, totality would not occur. There’s no scientific reason for this; it’s a wondrous coincidence.
And for millennia, this coincidence has fostered scientific discoveries — about the sun and moon, of course, but also about the Earth itself. Eclipses occur like…
