The Great American Eclipse - What is it, and why is everyone so excited?

Eclipses have been prominent figures in movies and books for millennia, they have enraptured the mind and bedazzled the human eye since the dawn of time. Now, north America will be enjoying an eclipse that it almost seems intended specifically for us! It is certain to be breathtaking and there is a series of places across the states that viewers will get to experience totality which is a particularly exciting event!

It doesn't look quite like this, which is the image of the eclipse that so often graces our media. Totality is when the moon completely covers the san, and you can see only the edges of the suns corona twinkling out from behind the dark surface of the moon. It looks a little more like this:

So what makes this particular eclipse so special? Well there hasn't been an eclipse that had totality visible all the way across the united states since 1918! It won't happen again for a few hundred years either, so this is one of those miraculous events that is genuinely once in a life time! There are plenty of places you can view the eclipse from if you want to see a grand spectacle!

However, there are some concerns with viewing an eclipse! It can be seriously damaging to your eyes, so its best not to view it with the naked eye. Instead it is advised you get a pair of solar shields, which are a sort of sunglasses that have incredibly dark lenses. So dark that you can't see anything through them except the brightest of lights, this helps to shield your eyes from the harmful rays of the suns corona. NASA has been distributing solar shields to science centers across America so now would be a great time to visit your local planetarium and investigate! Another option is to build a pinhole camera, which helps reflect the light so you can see the sun without looking at it at all! They work by projecting the image of the sun onto the ground or another sheet of paper. This way you can see the movement of the moon, without the risk to your eyes.

So now that you're all hyped and ready for this spectacular event, lets break this down a little and talk about the science of an eclipse. Why does it happen in the first place? There are several different kinds of eclipses, solar eclipses just happen to be the most exciting. An eclipse occurs when one celestial body obscures the light of another by moving in front of it. There can be lunar eclipses, or solar eclipses and various states of each. This graphic helps to visualize the states of an eclipse:

It's actually miraculous that the eclipse even happens like this. It is total chance that totality can even happen. Our sun and moon are the perfect distance apart that from our vantage point, when they are in the same location they totally eclipse each other. Most other celestial bodies only partially eclipse each other, and in fact over the next million or so years totality will cease. Because our moon is slowly moving away from earth eventually we will only be able to experience annular eclipses. So we had better enjoy the spectacle now, since the future of humanity might not be able to! Though hopefully by then they will have the technology to appreciate a plethora of interstellar phenomena!

Let me know if you have any more interesting eclipse facts! Or share your plans for the eclipse this year! I'd love to hear where all my fellow steemians are planning to view the eclipse from!