Lunar Eclipse: An Email to a Daughter and Son-in-Law
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This email from a father to a child reminds me of the emails my Dad sent us in the lead up to our trip. I’ve never seen my Dad so excited for anything. The day of the flight, he was awake at 1am his local time to start watching the flight schedule and the weather. He wrote lots of reminders, to make sure that I packed Lauren’s identification, Pull Ups and wipes. And he wanted to make sure that Lauren had a window seat where she wouldn’t just stare out at a wing. No no no, his only granddaughter was going to have a view. (Strangely, the day of the flight was cloudy as hell until we got to the mountains, then we flew over the Rockies with barely a cloud in sight. It was as if Grandpa put in his order for weather that would give his granddaughter the best view imaginable).
I was pretty scared in the lead up. I hate flying at the best of times and this was my first solo flight with a three year old. Shit, I’m hardly qualified to deal with Webpack when it has a tantrum. This is a bloody human life in a plane.
The flight was amazing and reading my Dad’s dispatches every ten minutes added to our excitement. When we landed, my Dad and stepmother were visibly excited. My daughter ran to them and the three of them had a wonderful moment.
My Dad’s emails were purely about his excitement. And this dad’s email makes him sound just as excited as my Dad was. I am only going to have one child and I pray that one day, I get to be that excited about my little girl hopping on a flight to visit me. If my excited message happens to go public and it contains some factual issues, I hope to hell that the people who read it recognize it for what it is...I’ll just be a really excited dad who is doing whatever I can to pass the time before I get to see someone I love more than life! :)
During a lunar eclipse, the earth projects its shadow on the moon. During a Solar Eclipse, the moon projects its shadow on the earth. Only the shadow is smaller. I'm not sure what makes lunar eclipses more real.
What we call lunar eclipses are what the inhabitants of the Moon would call solar eclipses and what we call solar eclipse they would call Earth eclipses, if they used similar terminology.
- During a solar eclipse, something appears to change with the sun, but appearances are deceptive: all that a so-called "solar" eclipse means is that the observer happens to be in a small region a few miles across on earth; one can easily drive to a different place and see that the sun is unaffected and continues to shine as usual. Despite the name, a solar eclipse is really an event about a small patch of earth.
- During a lunar eclipse, something appears to change with the moon, and this is right! The moon really does fall under shadow, something that's true wherever the observer may be. A lunar eclipse really corresponds to something happening on the moon.
Of course if you define away the difference by saying that eclipses are only about a specific observer at a specific point on earth, there is no difference, but that's not the point being made.
But it's possibly cultural what you think of as an “eclipse”. In Indian languages, the word from Sanskrit used is grahaṇa, which is from the verb for seizing, holding, catching, capturing, etc. So “solar eclipse” and “lunar eclipse” are literally “sun-capture” and “moon-capture”. Now from a very literal reading, neither of those is real: neither the sun nor the moon is really seized or captured anyway.
But based on the connotation that I think most people have, we can say:
* During a solar eclipse, you may think something's happening to the sun, but that's not real; that's only virtual.
* During a lunar eclipse, you may think something's happening to the moon, and that's real.
So I hope we can agree that there is something that's “real” during a lunar eclipse and not during a solar eclipse (namely, the corresponding named body being physically affected in some way); whether the word “eclipse” carries that connotation to you is of course something for only you to say.
No. I understand what you're saying, but it is simply not true that nothing is happening to the sun during a solar eclipse. Something is happening to the sun: it is being blocked from your view by the moon. It is perfectly analogous to what happening to the moon during a lunar eclipse: it is being blocked from the sun's view by the earth. The situations are exactly the same except for two things: the scope, and the perspective of an earth-bound observer. But IMHO those differences are not nearly enough to warrant labeling one of those "real" and the other one "virtual". They are both equally real.
At this point we're just debating the meanings of words and phrases like "something is happening to the sun" and whether being blocked from the view of someone on earth counts as something happening to the sun; one can very well argue whether shadows are real ("of course it's real, you see it right there" versus "no a shadow has no physical existence, it just looks like there's a dark object on the ground") and so on. At some point one ought to grant that others attach subtly different connotations to words.
If you're going to question people's perspective, tell them this instead of telling them that solar eclipses are virtual.
But that is simply not true. An observer on the sun can tell, and the observation is both easy and significant: it would look like a transit of the moon across earth that passes over Europe.
During a solar eclipse, someone on the sun would hardly notice. The surface temperature does not change; the brightness does not change; the earth is about a 100 million miles away and occupies less than 10^-7% of the sun's sky (18 arc seconds; compare with the ~30 arc minutes that the sun or moon occupy in earth's sky). An observer on the sun would need to have very good optical instruments to take note of the entire earth in the first place; let alone the patch of earth a few miles across that is experiencing a total solar eclipse. Unless they were looking for it, they would not be aware of (what the earthlings call) a solar eclipse taking place.
(During a solar eclipse, we people on the earth do notice. The sun is hugely significant to the earth physically even though the earth is barely significant to the sun; the temperature can fall by maybe 15 degrees Celsius; people in the affected area of earth are plunged into darkness, etc.)
As a physically significant phenomenon, what's real during a solar eclipse (in somewhat the same way as a lunar eclipse) is happening on earth; if we called it a terrestrial eclipse it would be fairly real, but is the sun significantly affected? I'd say not really.
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Now, as this is my last post, there are a few philosophical issues this conversation has brought up:
- One is a question of ontology: What is "real"? I think people can differ in the level of how physical/material their ontology is; certainly everyone would agree about a visual spectacle taking place, but some would consider more "physical" phenomena more real (as in my earlier remark about whether shadows are “real”), and a brightness-and-temperature difference over half the entire moon is surely a physically more significant event (to the moon) than some faraway object casting a shadow on another faraway object would be to the sun.
- The second is a question of semantics: What connotations does the word "eclipse" carry? To some people, it carries connotations (e.g. "X-adj eclipse"="X experiencing a seizure") such that, for instance, a "solar eclipse"="sun being darkened" is only appearance not reality, while "lunar eclipse"="moon being darkened" is both appearance and reality.
- The third is a question of interpretation/hermeneutics. When I read something, I'm trying to see: "Is there some interpretation under which what I'm reading is correct?" The question of "Is there some interpretation under which the author of the above email is wrong, and solar eclipses are similar to lunar eclipses?" is not very interesting; of course the answer is yes, and in my earlier comments I've mentioned at least three interpretations under which the author is wrong. Certainly, it's not the language I'd use: before reading the post I'd never have described lunar eclipses as real and solar eclipses as virtual, and I probably still won't. Maintaining that the author is wrong does not challenge my perspective or contribute anything new to my life. I feel secure in my understanding of eclipses, and if someone has a different perspective, it does not feel like my perspective is being questioned; it's just an opportunity. On the other hand, "Is there an interpretation under which the author is right?" (the principle of charity) is more interesting, and having newly experienced this perspective I've been defending an answer of "yes": yes, not only is there a combination of connotations of "solar eclipse" and "real" under which a so-called solar eclipse is not a "solar-ly" significant event (thus not "real" in that sense), but also it's quite a fresh way of looking at things and appreciating how, even though both appear the same to us, one (which we call a "sun-seizure") is an event of significance only to us puny humans on earth and the sun is unaffected, while the other is truly, improbably, a case where the earth (our home!) has an unmissable effect on the moon, a case where our visual perception, of the moon falling into shadow, is actually correct, something contrary to our perception being so frequently wrong in the astronomical domain where for instance the sun and moon and stars appear to rotate around us every day and night but reality is different.
That doesn't make the event any less real. An event doesn't have to be dramatic to be real.
• “solar eclipse = sun gets darkened” is only appearance, not reality.
• “lunar eclipse = moon gets darkened” is both appearance and reality.
(I can guess what the response is going to be: either “that's not what ‘eclipse’ means”/“why care about that?”, or “but the sun does get darkened, as viewed from earth”. Thus the conversation goes in circles. Really I should stop; I've said all this already.)
The discussions about the subjective nature of a solar eclipse vs the objective nature of a lunar eclipse are especially relevant if you find yourself in an aircraft travelling at 550mph, as no advantage will be given in terms of duration for this particular celestial event.
Compare to solar eclipses where strategically flown aircraft can extend totality by some margin: https://www.space.com/42768-total-solar-eclipse-july-2019-ai...
Fun factoids:
Eclipses typically occur in pairs, one solar and one lunar. They occur two weeks apart. (Sometimes there is a third one.)
Eclipses occur every six months, but most are partial. Total eclipses are much less common.
Photos taken during a total solar eclipse proved Einstein's Theory of Relativity and helped make him famous overnight.
In private window it just works but still I consider the design of checking login on a page that doesn't require it quite bad.
But yea, doing this on a public list.. creepy.
I guess I don't see how it's all that different from you sharing your story here.
Any story which is about "I once did a with b" invites the "why are you telling us" response but I think specifically in this context, you're shitposting.
It is normal to post an anecdote related to the link.
It is weird to post a message like this to a public mailing list out of nowhere, i.e. without related context.
(I have not actually checked if the message was out of the blue.)
In a lunar eclipse the moon actually really does get dark - no light falls on it any more. There is no point anywhere from which you will be able to see a moon that receives any light from the sun, because it doesn't.
During a solar eclipse on the other hand there is no change whatsoever to the sun, it continues to shine just the same. Only those under the shadow of the moon see a change.
Just to clarify, I'm merely relaying the point of the author. I have nothing to say about the use of language, he chose the words that he did and some may find them confusing and some may not. The way he expressed it is separate from the point made though, and OPs comment ignored that point.
* A (total) solar eclipse is merely a statement that you, the observer, happen to be present in a small region of a few miles' radius, wherever the moon's shadow happens to be. If you imagine yourself flying around in space (or even just driving around in a car), you can very easily get out of this region and see that the sun continues to shine, etc.
* A (total) lunar eclipse is a statement that the earth's shadow falls on the moon. No matter where you are in space, this is a statement about the amount of light reaching the moon's surface, independent of where the observer happens to be.
You may not care about this, deciding that your vantage point as an observer is all that matters (whether your view of the sun or moon changes, respectively) by saying "Obviously eclipse is measured relative to the observer", but the author cares, and it's an interesting point. Obviously he's not claiming that a solar eclipse isn't "real" in the sense that you can't see it; only that it doesn't correspond to any astronomical event that is observer-independent (and relevant to more than a small region of the earth).
Edit: Another way of saying this is that despite the name, a "solar" eclipse is a statement about (a small region of) the earth -- that's the part that gets less light; the sun is unaffected by a solar eclipse. On the other hand, a lunar eclipse is really a statement about the moon; the moon really does get less light during a lunar eclipse, as the moon is what is in shadow.
> no light falls on it any more
And Sun still shines the same during lunar eclipse too. Only those under the shadow of the Earth see the difference. It is just that Earth's shadow is big enough to cover the Moon and that's it. Neither eclipse is more or less "real" than the other one.
What we call “a lunar eclipse” is a solar eclipse in the Moon. What we call a solar eclipse is a solar eclipse on Earth. We can also observe solar eclipses (total or partial) on other bodies in the solar system.
I agree that both are real, with a real shadow. But for a (total) lunar eclipse the full Moon is in the shadows, while in a solar eclipse a little shadow traverses the Earth surface.
In case of lunar eclipse, the view of the Moon is obscured by the shadow of Earth. I.e. Sun's light is blocked by Earth, so it doesn't reflect back to Earth from the Moon. In case of solar eclipse, the view of the Sun is obscured by the Moon itself (which throws shadow on Earth), i.e. you don't see direct light from the Sun blocked by the Moon.
Both are pretty real and both are called eclipses.
It's good sometimes to be reminded that differences of opinion aren't always down to stupidity.
Most often difference of opinion arises due to understanding or rather misunderstanding. And misunderstanding arises due to the language or linguistic barrier.
It takes intelligence to see through the language barrier and to understand someone. Just disagreeing and calling someone stupid shows one's own intellectual deficiency.
Anyway nice profile name. :D
In what way, and why?
Apart from the unobstructed view and the fun factor, I don't think being on a plane bestows any great advantage to the casual observer versus being on the ground.
The last full lunar eclipse we had here I heard many people comment on how 3D - "marble like" - it looked, that's not something that's going to be any better from a plane, nor is it an effect which "pops" out at you, in my experience.
Also, due to its atmosphere, the Earth's shadow is certainly not "sharply edged", far from it, and you won't be seeing its edge climbing mountains and valleys, nor be able to calibrate your watch to the second from the start of it. Again, being on a plane won't make any difference on this front. Ironically, for great views of sharp edged shadows its a partial moon you want to observe.
Finally, if my use of https://staratlas.com/ is correct, I don't think the moon is going to be at a straight though the window level as it begins for them over Oman unfortunately, but rather at 45 degrees up, so some neck craning is going to be needed after all unfortunately.
Regardless, I'm sure the couple addressed in the letter will have a lovely time.