Eclipse, An experience not to be missed

On April 20, a solar eclipse occurred that Australia, Indonesia and New Guinea were able to enjoy, and it is a unique and very strange experience where the sky darkens in broad daylight, the animals go to sleep, you can see the stars and it is the only time we can see the solar corona, which is the sun's atmosphere.

It is an experience that we should all live at least once. The good news is that not one, but two solar eclipses are coming in a period of less than a year, the first will be on October 14, 2023 and the second will be on October 8, 2023. April 2024 one of these will cross many Latin American countries and both will be visible in Mexico and the United States.

Maybe we all already know what eclipses are, but I'm going to explain it quickly anyway, the earth is basically a rock in the shape of a ball and the moon is a smaller ball, it has a quarter of the diameter of the earth more or less and it goes around the earth in an almost circular orbit, almost but not and that's important.

Eclipses are the alignment between the sun, the Earth and the Moon that allows the shadow of one to be projected on the other, in a lunar eclipse it is the shadow of the earth that darkens the moon and in a solar eclipse it is the shadow of the moon in which a part of the earth darkens, which is where the eclipse is visible from where we are.

The smallest shadows because the moon is smaller than the earth, the moon completes one revolution around the earth every 28 days and the earth completes one revolution around the sun every 365 days, not exact, but more or less, the orbit of the earth around the sun forms an imaginary plane, to which we call the ecliptic plane, if the plane of the moon's orbit around the earth coincided with the ecliptic plane it would be great because we would have eclipses every 28 days, that is, every Moon new there would be a solar eclipse and every full moon there would be a lunar eclipse, but the chaotic universe as it is doesn't work that way.

The plane of the moon's orbit is inclined with respect to the ecliptic plane plus or minus 5 degrees and this makes those moments when the moon casts its shadow on the Earth and the earth casts its shadow on the moon are much less frequent, Solar eclipses are even less frequent than lunar eclipses because the moon's shadow is much smaller, so there is less chance that the moon's shadow will miss here on earth.

This photo was taken by the Japanese spacecraft Hakuto-R during the eclipse of April 20, 2023 before crashing on the surface of the moon and leaving some tardigrades scattered around, we can see how the shadow of the moon darkens a small area of the earth, on the other hand, during a lunar eclipse, the shadow of the earth can darken the full moon, while bathing it with the reddish light of our sunrises and sunsets.

Eclipses allow us to see solar flares that protrude from its surface and the Corona that is the sun's atmosphere, things that normally the dazzling brightness of the sun's surface does not allow us to observe, that is why solar eclipses are so important that they allow us to observe and understand things from the sun that we can't at any other time.

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